The Long Journey Home is a work of nonfiction. Some names
and identifying details have been changed.
Copyright © 2011 by Margaret Robison
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
SPIEGEL & GRAU and Design is a registered
trademark of Random House, Inc.
Portions of Chapter 24 were originally published in “Begin by Remembering,” Common Journeys, Fall, 1995. The following were originally published in Kaleidoscope: International Magazine of Literature, Fine Arts, and Disability: an earlier version of Chapter 2 appeared as “The Headache” (Spring/Fall, 1998); Chapter 5 was originally published as “Common Bonds” (Summer/Fall, 1999); and portions of Chapter 7 were originally published in “Renascence” (Winter/Spring, 1993).
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission
to reprint previously published material:
Harvard University Press: “There is a pain so utter” from The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition by Emily Dickinson, edited by Ralph W. Franklin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College.
Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., and Harold Ober Associates Incorporated: Four lines from “Dreams” from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, Associate Editor, copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Print rights in the United Kingdom and worldwide electronic and audio rights are administered by Harold Ober Associates Incorporated. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., and Harold Ober Associates Incorporated.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Robison, Margaret.
The long journey home: a memoir / Margaret Robison.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-922-2
1. Robison, Margaret. 2. Robison, Margaret—Childhood and youth. 3. Robison, Margaret—
Family. 4. Robison, Margaret—Health. 5. Women artists—United States—Biography.
6. Artists—United States—Biography. 7. Women authors, American—Biography.
8. Young women—Georgia—Biography. I. Title.
CT275.R7435A3 2011
975.8’043092—dc22 2010029327
[B]
www.spiegelandgrau.com
Jacket design: Abby Weintraub
Jacket images: courtesy of the author (girl), Ronnie Sampson, Viridian/iStock Vectors/Getty Images (bird)
v3.1
For Pat King
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Part One: The Early Years
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Part Two: The Beginning of Us
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Part Three: Roses and the Pineapple Doctor
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Part Four: “Hold Fast to Dreams”
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Prologue
1980
“Why are you here?”
A young psychiatrist sat across from me, clipboard propped against his crossed leg. My friend Helen and Dr. Turcotte’s daughter June sat beside me, silent. My son Chris stood in the doorway, his adolescent face earnest and distressed.
“Because the Amherst water is polluted,” I replied flatly. “Because the rain is poisoned.”
Dr. Turcotte sat across from me, sleeping, his chin resting on his chest. Lamplight glistened on his thick white hair. It was he who had driven me to this psychiatric hospital, who had driven us all, me in the backseat silent.
“Because I have a therapist I wouldn’t recommend to the devil,” I said.
The young psychiatrist wrote something on the questionnaire clamped to the clipboard.
I did not tell him that a bomb as large as the one that leveled Hiroshima was about to go off anytime.
My son shifted his weight. Behind him, in the hall, a nurse pushed a cart full of medications past the open door.
The doctor looked up from his questionnaire. “Religion?”
With my breath I lifted a hot-air balloon off the ground and was keeping it afloat at a safe height. The balloon basket was sturdy and well insulated. If I can keep my son, friends, and myself in the air until the danger is past, we’ll all be safe, I thought.
“Religion?” the doctor asked again.
“I take the best from each and throw the rest away,” I answered sullenly. I don’t remember how long I kept the balloon aloft, but I was exhausted from the effort.
“What day of the week is this?”
“I don’t know.”
I looked down at my bandaged fingers and left wrist. I had burned my fingers by holding them against the coils of a small electric heater in my kitchen. Before or after this I had pressed a burning cigarette into the flesh of my left wrist. But I have no memory of doing these things, only a memory of lying on a table in the hospital’s emergency room while a doctor dressed the wounds. Self-inflicted wounds. I looked down at the bandaged evidence, feeling a mix of incredulity and shame.
“What’s today’s date?”
“I don’t know.”
The doctor scribbled something on the paper again.
“My mother never knows the date when she’s writing or painting,” Chris said. His statement sounded like a plea. What he meant was that I didn’t keep up with the date even when I wasn’t crazy.
The bomb didn’t go off. How hard I worked, using my breath to keep us so high for so long.
Now I was in a decompression chamber. People came and went, saying nothing. No one understood what was happening to me. It didn’t matter. I didn’t expect them to.
Breathe, I told myself. Just breathe.
My son and friends left the hospital for the night.
I stood before a mirror, talking to myself, gesturing with both hands. But when I try to remember what I was telling or asking my image in the mirror, when I try to go back to enter this experience again, I am able only to stand outside my body. Like someone floating above a car accident, looking down at her crushed and mangled limbs, I can only observe. I feel nothing. But when I look into my eyes, what I see there is terror.
PART ONE
The Early Years
Chapter One
I
1935
MOTHER STOOD AT THE TOP OF THE LADDER, SCRAPING WALLPAPER OFF the living room walls with a putty knife. Uncle Frank’s wife, my Aunt Mary, came through the unlatched screen door without knocking.
She looked up at Mother.
“Louisa, I just want you to know that you’ll never have a house as nice as mine.” Mother looked down at Aunt Mary, who stood with her hands on her hips, a white leather handbag looped over one arm. She was dressed in a red-and-lavender polka-dotted dress and white sling-backed shoes. “I tell you this now so you get all such thoughts out of your head from the start,” Aunt Mary continued.
Mother—married three months and already six weeks pregnant with me—was wearing a sweat-drenched cotton housedress. Scraps and curls of wallpaper lay around the ladder. All afternoon she’d been soaking down the layers of old, stained paper and scraping them off; rose-colored stripes and rosebuds, formal bouquets and baskets of violets, bits and pieces of Richter family history were now strewn on the floor.
Aunt Mary was much older than Mother, who had married the youngest of the three sons in the Richter family. Daddy and Uncle Frank were partners in a produce business. With their sister Bama—her real name was Alabama Margarete—living miles away in Columbia, North Carolina, Aunt Mary was reigning matriarch, and according to Mother she intended to keep it that way.
Mother climbed down the ladder. “Why, Mary,” she said in what must have been that sweet tone of hers—ice water running just beneath the words—“a new house is the farthest thing from my mind. I’m just trying to get this dirty old place clean and decent before the baby comes.”
She offered Aunt Mary a glass of mint tea.
Aunt Mary declined. Hers was not a social call.
This was one of the first stories Mother told me, and she retold it again and again. This, and how Aunt Mary somehow manipulated herself into the delivery room to watch Mother’s manners and restraint dissolve into one scream after another as I wrestled my way out of her tortured body while lightning lit the sky and thunder rumbled like an angry god. “Your birth was the most terrible thing that had ever happened to me,” she repeatedly told me.
Mother was twenty-four years old when I was born.
She never stopped talking about what she referred to as the humiliation of Aunt Mary’s shocking invasion of her privacy. She claimed that the sight of my aunt’s face over my carriage was enough to send me into a fit of screaming. I don’t know if Aunt Mary actually scared me or if I picked up on Mother’s controlled but ever-present and powerful emotions. I have no memories at all of Aunt Mary in my infancy. Nevertheless, I grew up with Mother’s stories of her a part of me as surely as the genes that gave me green eyes and a prominent nose like my father’s.
Growing up I had a pleasant relationship with Aunt Mary until Uncle Frank died in a house fire in 1945 and Daddy and Aunt Mary had a dispute about the division of property and the business. After that Aunt Mary forbade her children to relate to us, though her son Peyton and I continued our friendship in secret and her daughter Roberta remained fond of Mother.
As an adult, on a trip back to my hometown—I believe it was in 1970—I decided to ignore the tension of the years and visit Aunt Mary. I phoned first, and her daughter-in-law said it would be fine for me to visit. Aunt Mary welcomed me warmly. She was lying in bed, smoking a cigarette. Holes from cigar and cigarette burns dotted her lavender satin comforter. Beside the bed a wicker clothes basket held a pile of paperback murder mysteries.
I bent down to hug her, and she opened her arms eagerly.
“I’m so glad to see you, Margaret. Here, sit on the bed beside me,” she said as if the past twenty-five years of silence and distance between us had never existed. And in a sense that’s true, for that brief visit seemed to erase the past as easily as my teachers had erased numbers and letters from the blackboards in the elementary school around the corner from her house.
Mother and Aunt Mary had a contentious relationship from the time Mother married Daddy until the evening Aunt Mary called her not long after my visit. Mother told me that the two of them talked for nearly two hours, finally making their peace. According to Mother, my aunt died shortly after hanging up the phone.
There were other stories Mother told me about the four years we lived in The Old Home Place before Granddaddy died and we moved to the new house up the street. She told me Daddy was often away on business trips, leaving her alone with Granddaddy and me, and Bubba, my first brother, the new baby who kept her awake with his earaches. One night, when especially tired, she picked him up from the crib in the dark and—missing the rocking chair altogether—fell down hard on the floor beside it. “I just broke down and cried and cried,” she said each time she told the story, and each time my own eyes filled with tears. Mother seemed so fragile that I wanted to protect her.
She also told me about the way Daddy always put Granddaddy before her. “He made me sit in the backseat of the car while that old man sat up front with him. Even when I was pregnant.” And she told me that after Granddaddy died Daddy kissed the glass over his photograph every day before leaving for work and the first thing on coming home. There was also the framed eight-by-ten photograph of Uncle Frank that stood on a table in the living room of our new house after Uncle Frank was killed in the fire. I would walk away from the picture, then turn around quickly to see if those eyes were still watching me. They always were. They followed me all around the room. I swallowed my fear and told no one.
I don’t remember when or how she managed it without Daddy’s resistance, but I was relieved when Mother took Uncle Frank’s photograph, along with the large-framed photograph of my Aunt Bama’s house in Columbia, and buried them under the bedsheets and blankets in the linen closet.
Mother had married into a more eccentric family than she’d realized. I suspect that Daddy had married into a more conservative family than he’d realized. Both had little tolerance of the other’s parents and siblings. Grandmother Ledford’s voice at our front door was enough to send my father, her son-in-law, fleeing through the back door to his car, and then to the safety of the produce warehouse.
Mother too had difficulty with Grandmother Ledford. Though in her later years she referred to her mother—at that point long dead—as a wonderful person, the tension between the two of them when I was young, until Grandmother’s death when I was fifteen, was thick and constant. Mother felt Grandmother to be cold and domineering, and closer to her other daughters. As the fourth daughter in a family with no sons, Mother felt unwanted. She told me how, when she was a young child, Grandmother would sometimes rock her in a rocker on the front porch in the evening. Packs of wild dogs skirted the town, howling. When Mother fussed and wouldn’t settle down to sleep quickly enough, Grandmother would threaten: “Hush! If you don’t go to sleep, I’ll feed you to those dogs.”
Mother was also upset about Uncle Frank’s cursing and drinking, and Aunt Bama’s intrusion into her life. She did more than complain about the occasional beer that Daddy drank at a drive-in restaurant. My birth finally gave her adequate ammunition to fight this rare indulgence. The three of us were together when Daddy reached for the beer he’d ordered. Mother announced firmly: “If you take one sip of that alcohol, I’ll give it to the baby as well. I intend to make the baby drink whatever you drink.”
Her voice filled with pride. “That was the end of your father’s drinking.”
Then there was Fanny McClure. Fanny had a long, thick neck and dark wavy hair that spilled down her back. To me she always looked like a merry-go-round horse. My cousin Peyton told me that Fanny had been determined to capture Daddy for her own until Mother came into the picture and altogether eliminated what—if any—chance Fanny ever had. Nevertheless, according to Peyton, for several years after my parents’ marriage, Fanny devoted many Sunday afternoons to riding back and forth in front of their house in her dark green Chevrolet sedan. Uncle Charlie, Daddy’s middle brother, offered to take Fanny off Daddy’s hands. He not only did that, he married her as well. Mother never mentioned anything about Fanny chasing Daddy. I don’t know if she was even aware of it. But she did tell me that for some reason Fanny didn’t like her and had once tried to run her down with her car when Mother was cross
ing the street from Mizell’s Drugs to Roddenbery Hardware Store. But these things happened after Granddaddy died, after we moved into the new house up the street.
It was into The Old Home Place, the wood-framed house that Granddaddy had built, that Mother—who by her own account was immature, naïve, and timid—moved after marrying Daddy, bringing her clothes and her few treasured books. She looked forward to a life of financial plenty after all the penny-pinching necessary in her father’s family, one of the most respected families in town but one lacking in financial abundance. The reason, Mother always explained with pride, was because her father, Mercer Ledford, was one of the rare honest lawyers. He also served as state senator and later as state treasurer; national senators and representatives were his friends. As a child, Mother was impressed that Senator Russell wore silk pajamas when he stayed overnight with the family. As an adult, Mother, who hated asking favors of anyone, called Senator Russell and reminded him that she was Mercer Ledford’s daughter when she asked him for help in bringing my brother Mercer back to the States after he became psychotic while serving on a ship stationed off the coast of Vietnam. Senator Russell responded immediately and had a helicopter pick my brother up and take him to the Philippines, then to Bethesda Naval Hospital.
Mother spoke with adoration about her father, but she told me only a few stories about him. One is how he gave her sister Curtis a dollar for every A she made in math, while he gave Mother a dollar for every time she passed math. She also told me how he sometimes bought ice cream for his daughters on his evening walks home from his courthouse office, during which he stopped to say hello to so many friends along the way that he often arrived home with the ice cream melting, cones gone soft in his large hands.
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