Landscapes of the Heart

by Elizabeth Spencer

  Leflore was proud of his standing with President Andrew Jackson and others he had negotiated with, face-to-face. The coach that had once taken him to Washington stood housed at Malmaison, a prized memento. During the Civil War, he refused to abandon his U.S. citizenship; he would not betray that, at least. The neighboring McCains were all Confederates, yet respected a neighbor’s right to choose. There was hostility toward Leflore, attempts on his life, threats to burn the mansion. Some from the McCain place came to stand guard at night. This story was told in our family with pride. We felt for his independent spirit; friendship made us obliged to honor it.

  I, of course, never laid eyes on this remarkable man, dead long before my time. Faithful to the Union, but acting for his tribe with such disastrous results. Seeing them march impoverished away to an uncertain future, yet staying put himself with handsome bounties awarded by the federal government for his aid in negotiation. Hero or opportunist? One cannot finally say. He was now owner of fifteen thousand acres of some of the best land in the state and a thousand slaves, plus a grandiose residence second to none. He was noted for good business sense, and traded in cotton and lumber with great success. His portrait is worth pondering. Those eyes are looking at reality.

  We all knew his descendants. In my childhood, with Uncle Joe and Aunt Esther at our plantation nearby, we often went to Malmaison. There were annual fairs on the extensive grounds around the mansion; country produce was displayed in the two “garçonnieres,” small houses which stood flanking the drive on either reach of the front lawns. Leflore’s daughter Rebecca Cravat had married the architect of Malmaison, a man named James Harris. Harris took his payment when the house was complete by asking for Rebecca’s hand. It was their granddaughter whom I remember best, a pretty, pleasant lady named Frances (“Miss Fannie Eva”) Montgomery. Of Mr. Montgomery I remember little being said; he must have died early on. Miss Fannie Eva’s two sons were William and Andrew.

  Andrew Montgomery was one of the handsomest young men I ever saw. His Indian blood must have been minimal, but some of it was certainly in his makeup. He was of average height, very strong-looking. His hair was black as coal, his eyes dark. I was a gangly little girl one hot summer afternoon when we were all at Malmaison. He must have seen that I was restless with grown folks’ talk, for he said, “Would you like to go up and see the lookout?” He meant the cupola. Of course I said yes.

  Together we climbed the stairs to the second floor, then some narrow stairs that ran steeply upward. Reaching the top, Andrew opened the doors of the small house, stiff from disuse, and, telling me to be careful of the railing, led me to look out over the extensive lands on every side. I could see Teoc Creek, a winding ribbon, edged with sand. I could see, I thought, all the way to our own family place, and the oak grove around the house. Rolling country, with wooded hills and open fields, breaking down toward the flat stretches of the Delta. How Indian on that summer afternoon it all seemed! One could know the sense of ownership the proud chieftain must have had, as the Frenchman in him took pride in the furnishings and portraits in the rooms below.

  Ostracized by Indians and under a cloud among Southern whites, Greenwood Leflore ended his life in solitary pride, seated on the front veranda at Malmaison, wrapped in the U.S. flag, awaiting death. All these facts, which I learned through the years, have filled in around his name. But I still have no clear image of the man himself.

  The handsome Andrew Montgomery was killed in battle during World War II. I was off working in Nashville when Uncle Joe wrote that he was “going today to a burial service for poor Andrew,” whose remains had been shipped home. I recalled the evening Andrew had burst in on my uncle and me dining in a booth at Lusco’s, the famous restaurant in Greenwood. He was with his fiancée, a lovely blonde, whose photograph had recently been chosen out of thousands for the cover of a national magazine. They were both so happy, talking excitedly. Like the few minutes on the cupola when he waved his arm out over all of the Teoc country, that memory has no darkness in it at all.

  In 1942, the unthinkable happened. Malmaison caught fire and burned to the ground. I was not living in Carrollton when it occurred, but the shock was something I feel to this day.

  The evening of the tragedy has been reported in great detail. It was during the war, the last day of March, a blustery, windy evening. Miss Fannie Eva had driven with her sister Florence to a neighboring town to hear firsthand news of Andrew from an Army buddy who was visiting home. When she returned at dusk, two other ladies had driven out from Greenwood to see her.

  The four women were alone in the house, talking together in a downstairs room, when they heard a mysterious knocking and cried out to know who was there. After a pause the knocking continued. They called out again, but no one replied. They took up guns. Soon they heard footsteps walking in upstairs rooms above them. Going each to a different entrance, they fired into the night to call in neighbors. They never saw anyone. Smoke alerted them to what was happening.

  The women set about at once to rescue what they could. The nearest fire truck was in Greenwood, fifteen miles away. They hauled out china and silver, pictures and chairs, and grappled with heavy furniture, but the mansion was catching fast.

  What a blaze it must have been! The windy night grew bright as noonday. A full moon rode high overhead. Word spread quickly and crowds drove out from Carrollton but could only watch. Malmaison died blazing with Indian fury, like a final flamboyant gesture, funeral pyre and warlike signal. In my mind’s eye, the cupola sends up a defiant blaze as high as the moon; then it plummets downward.

  William Faulkner wrote a great many stories with Indian characters, based on Indian life as he imagined it to be. Because he lived in Oxford, northeast of the Choctaw country, one has to surmise (without knowing positively, for I think he never says) that his Indians are mainly Chickasaw, a related and equally strong tribe, which lived in the Oxford and Holly Springs area. However, one of his stories, it seems to me, is clearly Choctaw, and so named; and the home mentioned in it—Contalmaison— is undoubtedly Malmaison.

  The story is “Mountain Victory.” In it a stranger comes to a remote mountain cabin in Tennessee. He has been a major under General Longstreet, and is now on his way from the surrender in Virginia to his home in Mississippi, mounted on a thoroughbred bay, attended by a dwarfish black servant. From the twisted events that follow, a violent story surfaces. The mountain family is pro-Yankee; one of them has fought against the Rebels. Judging by his skin and intense features they take the stranger to be a “nigra.” He then tells his history—a grandfather who was Francois Vidal, a French nobleman, an émigré to New Orleans. Vidal married a Choctaw woman. Their son, Francis Weddel, had once driven to Washington to entreat with Andrew Jackson for better treatment of the tribe. The parallels to Leflore are too obvious to miss, yet the allegiance here is to the South.

  The officer’s name is Saucier Weddel, a corruption of Vidal, just as the name Leflore had sprung from LeFleur. Weddel wears a worn, mended cape, lined in sable. He has cut pieces from the fur to wrap the feet of his servant. The daughter of the mountaineers and the younger son recognize and revere Weddel’s obvious aristocracy. They want to go with him, the daughter as his wife, the son as a servant. But the father and the older son react with a jealous hatred. The black servant, drunk on mountain whiskey, scorns them volubly as “white trash.” On these emotions the tale spins toward a tragic end. Readers of Faulkner are on familiar ground: the noble personage is trapped and doomed by his own nobility.

  What strikes home to me in the story is—precisely—home. Both the black servant and the chieftain’s son (how can I not see Andrew?) want to get there. It is their consuming passion. The servant speaks of it: “ ‘Ain’t you never hyeard tell of Countymaison? His grandpappy named it Countymaison caze it’s bigger den a county to ride over. You cant ride across it on a mule betwixt sunup and sundown.’ “ Weddel speaks of it: “ ‘I am a Mississippian. I live at a place named Contalmaison. My father built it
and named it. He was a Choctaw chief named Francis Weddel.’ “

  That night, trying to sleep in the barn loft and awaiting sunup, Weddel “lay rigid on his back in the cold darkness, thinking of home. ‘Contalmaison. Our lives are summed up in sounds and made significant. Victory. Defeat. Peace. Home… . It’s nice to be whipped; quiet to be whipped. To be whipped and to lie under a broken roof, thinking of home.’ “

  Like Andrew, he is never to reach it. Do any of us ever get there?

  When I was a child, we were always conscious of Indians, in a peripheral sort of way. The boys at home used to search for arrowheads in the pasture, and would bring them to school. I would ask my family if I had Indian blood. I was firmly assured that I did not. On the most distant points of the plantation at Teoc, riding with Uncle Joe, we would sometimes stop to talk with a saddle-colored man, who would be sitting on the porch of his house and would come out to speak with us. Uncle Joe would explain as we rode on, “That was a gentleman of color. One of the Leflores,” he would add, but I scarcely caught on at that time.

  There are natural open spaces in the wooded hills around Carrollton, going south toward Coila and Black Hawk, where, in the scarcely breathing quiet of a spring afternoon, one can feel the Choctaw presence still. They are about to walk through— silent, following some ancient path.

  Many people at home are said to have Choctaw blood, and have more recently begun to claim it, and journey out to tribal reunions in Oklahoma.

  Black Hawk itself, once a village, now not much more than a site, is said by those who have discovered artifacts there to be the oldest town in Mississippi, perhaps in the entire United States. It dates far back into prehistory, first home to an obscure tribe.

  The passing of Malmaison returned a plainness to that country, and along with the decline of our own family, at least in that place, leaves me with no wish to return. Teoc is gone in the old sense and something workaday, unadorned, has taken over. It is dispossessed. We “must grieve when even the Shade / Of that which once was great is passed away.” It is a very good thing to have grown up as neighbor to splendor.

  7

  THE SPENCERS

  ON the one hand there was Teoc and the McCains, on the other McCarley and the Spencers. McCarley was a community rather than a town, though it did have a store, a post office, a cotton gin, and a church or two. Like Carrollton it was in the hills, five miles to the northeast. It was a stop on the C. & G., the Columbus to Greenville railway.

  My father’s family were all from McCarley. They had property there, and were kin to half the neighborhood and beyond, but never owned any large acreage, my impression is, nor did they ever own slaves. They were always, however, connected with the railroad, the C. & G., and by extension the Southern Railroad. They owned the one store in McCarley, also the gin.

  My mother came to McCarley as a young woman to make a living for herself by teaching piano lessons. She had always been a prizewinner in musical contests. The traditional routine for proper young ladies accomplished in music was to find a room with a nice family who had a piano in the parlor and who would not mind the noise of scales being run and beginners’ pieces stumbled through during the afternoon hours. The place she found was with a certain Mrs. Redditt.

  My grandfather had driven her the five miles from Carrollton in the family buggy, to talk with the Redditts and set up the arrangement. As they were crossing the railroad track, she saw a young man standing down from the crossing, toward the station stop. He lifted his hat (I envision a straw boater) and waved it at her. She turned to my grandfather. “Can I wave back?” He told her yes and she did. She was waving at her future husband.

  James Luther Spencer—“Mr. Luke,” as he later became—was one of four or possibly five surviving brothers, though a number of other siblings had died, and one brother, Willie, had simply walked away and never returned. My parents being the last born or next to last among offspring who began arriving in the 1860s, I was, extraordinary as it seems, only one generation away from the Civil War. Both my grandfathers were not only alive and active during that tragic time, but my father’s father, who died long before I was born, had actually fought in it. He must have been through some of the worst of it, for he lost an arm at Gettysburg. This was Elijah Harrison Spencer. After the conflict, he worked as a rural mail carrier, as well as a farmer, I suppose, and did whatever else there was to put food on the table. Times were hard, everybody worked hard, but the sons seemed to have happy, affectionate memories to talk about.

  There were Thomas Harrison, and Louie Clyde, and Eddie Gray. Tom, the eldest, married and lived in Winona, another ten miles to the east, but Louie stuck around McCarley, and Luther, the youngest, who would become my father, must have started out working in the station agent’s office and in the store as well. Eddie Gray soon moved on to a “connection” with the Southern Railroad.

  Louie and Luther, working in tandem, were absolutely bound to clash for one simple reason: there was never but one authority in the world, and that was Luther Spencer. Perhaps this quality was what attracted my mother, for she had a Victorian admiration for strength and worthiness in men, shading toward “worth,” which in turn shades toward “amounting to something.” She was said to have been very pretty, and photographs prove it true. As a girl she had a number of admirers back in Carrollton. Her health was never robust, and at some point she must have left McCarley for Teoc.

  My father persisted, and would drive a buggy all that long way, a good fifteen or so miles over country roads, to spend Sundays with her, though he was, of course, visiting the whole McCain family as well. In a way he was courting them all. My grandmother was said to have liked him. She told my mother he was going to “amount to something.” He always recalled the long journey back to McCarley on Sunday nights, falling asleep in the buggy while his trusty little horse kept up a steady gait home.

  They both wound up in Carrollton. My father, raised a Methodist, became a Presbyterian before he knew it. My mother’s classic phrase of persuasion, often quoted, was “I will respect anything you want to be, but I can’t raise anything but a Presbyterian.”

  He had a store by then, down in North Carrollton, the separate village that had sprung up across the creek, near the railroad. I have an old photograph of him leaning on a counter, a bright-faced young man, his shelves stocked with goods behind him. He was known as a go-getter, and probably liked being called that.

  He seemed to have always had the same character: an indefatigable angler after whatever would earn money, a person of community spirit who helped others at such a breakneck speed they may have often wondered what hit them, a man who demanded total and absolute purity in womankind. My mother often wore white, and all his life he loved the virginal look of it. She would never wear even a touch of makeup.

  Dad became an authority on everything within five minutes after he heard it mentioned. He had no interest in it if he could not control or manage it, or if it could not make money. He disliked men who taught, at whatever level, because he judged them not good “b’inessmen.”

  Finding a pretty girl of a good family must have been enough for him, because why Dad ever liked a music teacher is a mystery. He had no love for music or feeling about it and could never carry a tune. He believed that made-up stories, poems, paintings, and so on through the whole lexicon of artistic endeavor, were simply foolishness, a waste of time, all right for women to indulge within limits, he supposed, but out of the question for a real man to take seriously.

  In this attitude he was different from his brothers. While not especially well educated, as they would have been if times had been different, and as they took care to see that their children were, they did not condemn differing tastes, and showed affectionate interest in what others could do. They were humane and comforting sorts, long-nosed and hazel-eyed, easy to be with, rational and practical, and they told innumerable stories. I know now they all agreed that Luther was different—in a sense one of them, but set apart by a
compulsion to compete, to “get ahead.”

  Yet they profited from his generosity. If one needed money to tide over a misfortune, he could borrow it from Luther. If a son needed a job, Luther would give it to him, letting a secretary go to provide it. If a daughter needed a place to live while she taught grade school in Carrollton, Luther’s house was to be her home.

  Eddie Gray, next to the youngest, had done a curious thing: he had gotten a divorce!. Divorce in those days was practically unheard of, especially in our connection. Uncle Ed had two boys, who by court order were his in the summers, and with Spencer practicality he simply brought them over to McCarley and Carrollton and parked them with the relatives. He did indeed visit from time to time. He had something of the air of a dandy, dressed handsomely, and distributed large wet kisses. He called me his “little ole sugar.” In the swing on our front porch, he would sit alone, admiring the sunset.

  His boys were wonderful fun. The arrival of Edward and Jamie in June of every year became an advent breathlessly awaited. When they came, our summer began.

  Everybody liked them. Jamie was my age almost to the day. Edward, older, was a small boy, but what made him the interesting equal of those taller than he, such as my brother and his friends, was his skill at tennis. He was a class act.

  We had always had a tennis court at the far side of the property, and on the first day after the boys arrived, with never a warning word to anyone playing there, my brother would take him out and introduce him, “our cousin from Tennessee,” and Edward would wait his turn to play. He would amble onto the court. Toss for serve. Then: Wham! Pow! Wow! Soon all the afternoon crowd turned from wherever they were straying and began to watch. Edward was dynamite, a wonder.