I was also shocked anew at the fiction he’d written about his father and me.
I don’t know why he chose to imagine me telling him about John’s and my wedding, but he did, including a false account of my emotional state that day. I felt upset at how he portrayed Lucille, the black woman who worked for my family until I was thirteen years old. I was especially offended by the way Chris said she talked. And she would never have added rum to the punch served at the wedding reception, for mine was not a drinking family. I certainly didn’t think the day of my wedding would be the happiest day of my life, as he wrote, and my friends never told me that I should go to New York City and become a model or an actress. Perhaps Chris wrote about the mother he wished he had.
Whether Chris’s memoirs are fact or fiction, the stories he’s written about his survival have inspired many young people with troubled childhoods to believe that they too can survive and succeed in life. For this I am grateful. Sometimes troubled parents and young people write to me at my website for support because of Chris, and I’m grateful I have had the opportunity to be of help. I send him love and wish him well as he continues to live his gifted and extraordinary life.
III
1938
Three years old, I woke from my afternoon nap. The room was hot and stuffy. I climbed from my bed and went outside to find my mother in the backyard. As the screen door slammed behind me, she looked up from where she was bent over in the flower garden and waved. I climbed down the steps and felt the warmth of the prickly grass on the soles of my bare feet.
Next door the undertaker unloaded a body from the hearse and carried it through the wide back door of the funeral home. I watched as he backed the hearse into its usual parking space and went inside again. Troubling thoughts tumbled inside me. First there were thoughts about Granddaddy’s recent death. Then I thought about my own death.
I felt frighteningly alone.
As if instructed to do so, I looked up at the sky.
Above me, three small white clouds floated slowly north—north past Grandmother’s house and Uncle Frank’s and the filling station; north to Albany and Atlanta; north to New York City, where Daddy went on business trips and bought me a dress from a place called Macy’s.
North.
As I stood watching those clouds, I heard a voice speaking in my heart. “Don’t worry, Margaret,” it said. “You will die in the North when you are very old. By that time you will understand about death and will not be afraid.”
My whole self filled with wonder. I felt comforted as never before. All my troubled thoughts dissolved, and I was once again in a world of butterflies and flowers and the heart-shaped fish pool where fish flashed gold among the lily pads.
Now I’m an old woman and live in the North, just as the voice told me I would. And I am no longer afraid of death. It’s been a long journey from the Cairo, Georgia, of my childhood to the New England of my old age, and I know that, for all its detours, wrong roads taken, and stops along the way, it has always been a spiritual one. I also know that the all-loving, all-knowing voice I heard in my heart when I was a child has been with me forever, even during the many times I turned away from it. I know now that I’ve always been coming home.
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to David Kuhn, my agent, who believed in this book from the beginning and sold it almost as soon as he received it, and to Jessi Cimaforte, an associate at Kuhn Projects, who encouraged and inspired me with her enthusiasm and her many positive remarks. I am also deeply grateful to my perceptive editor Cindy Spiegel, whose edits made all the difference, and to Hana Landes, assistant editor at Spiegel & Grau, who worked faithfully on my memoir. I am also forever indebted to Susan Wyant, who was the only person to read every page of this memoir during the ten years I spent working on it between writing several books of poetry. Susan not only gave me her insightful responses and brilliant suggestions, but also had a deep and consistent appreciation of my work that encouraged and inspired me through even the most difficult times of remembering and writing. I am forever thankful for my daughter-in-law Mary Robison, who continues to devote much of her time to doing everything she can to keep me healthy enough to continue my work. I’m grateful to my son Chris (Augusten Burroughs), who critiqued the chapters he read over the years and supported my work until the publication of his book Running with Scissors. And to my son John Elder Robison, author of Look Me in the Eye, who supports my memoir as well as supports me in my everyday life. I am especially grateful to my grandson, Jack, for his exuberant nature, his helpfulness, his sharing of his many interests, and the joy he gives me by simply being Jack.
I am forever indebted to Katherine Kendall, without whose help I might not have survived the stroke or healed enough to write this book, and to my brother Wyman Richter and his wife, Anne, whose help in telling me long-forgotten dates and places was essential. I’m grateful for the support of Barbara Jenkins, fellow writer and dear friend, whose brilliant and creative approach to speech therapy at Cooley-Dickinson Hospital in Northampton was a major contribution to my learning to speak again, and for all the help she continued to give me long after formal therapy was over. I’m also grateful for the support of Angela Manssolillo, my speech therapist in rehab at Mercy Hospital in Springfield, whose compassion and understanding were major in my learning to read poetry aloud again. Also for Sharlotte Risley, my occupational therapist, and my doctors Charles Brummer, Marci Yoss, and Lawrence Schiffman. I am grateful to Pat Schneider, who published my book-length poem Red Creek, and to Bethany Schneider, who edited my yet-to-be-published New and Selected Poems. And to Peter Schneider, who helped me learn to drive again after my stroke, and to Paul Schneider, who introduced me to David Kuhn.
I am deeply grateful for the supportive friendships of Dee Waterman, Marilyn Zelwian, Alaina Beach, Mary Jean Devlin, John Hapeman, Pat Bega, Debra Yaffee, Peg Robbins, Kathy Crane, Ruth Gallagher, Maija Meijers, June MacIvor, Mary Julia Richter Coons, Rita Larrow, Brian and Piyali Summer, Delores Culp, Dennis Helmus, Anne Plunkett, Clifton McCracken, Charles Lewis, Henry Lyman, and all of my PCAs over the years.
I’m grateful to my cousin Margaret Rushin Anderson, who became my friend after we met at my fourth birthday party. We were close friends until we graduated from high school and Margaret married and moved to Germany, while I began my freshman year of college. We became close again in 1984 and continue to be close. I am grateful not only for Margaret’s emotional support as I spent so many years looking back at my life, but also for all the rich conversations we had about our past as I wrote about it, and our present lives as we continue to experience them.
I am forever grateful to Pat King.
About the Author
A former leader of creative writing workshops in elementary schools, prisons, colleges, and her home, MARGARET ROBISON had a stroke in 1989 that paralyzed her left side and severely damaged her speech center. With many hours of hard work, she regained her ability to speak, but she continues to spend her days in a wheelchair. She is the author of four books of poetry, and an artist who has painted and exhibited many paintings in oils and watercolors. She lives in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, where she takes delight in watching the Deerfield River as it flows just outside the window above her writing table.
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