Landscapes of the Heart

by Elizabeth Spencer

Another teacher was a friend of Elizabeth’s, Virginia Peacock. Miss Peacock needed work and on Mrs. Arrington’s recommendation was invited there from Crystal Springs, another Mississippi town.

  Miss Peacock loved literature. She whirled right into teaching us all the authors she doted on—Hawthorne and Poe, Dickens and George Eliot. We slid right into reading adult works. (At that time, I had got stuck on Tarzan.) She raised a little money(!) and set up a school library (we never had one) in an old upright secretary. She kept the key herself and let us check out the books during lunch hour. Since our family had bookshelves stuffed with our own books, my impression until then was that “libraries” rightfully belonged at home, but now I learned better.

  Miss Peacock even made us read Shakespeare aloud, taking different roles. Each semester she would choose another play— As You Like It, Julius Caesar, and Romeo and Juliet. She had studied Shakespeare from Walter Clyde Curry at Vanderbilt while attending teachers college at Peabody in Nashville. He was a special hero of hers and she loved telling us stories of his presentations. She was good at reading aloud, and a good talker. “I read you this because I wanted to,” she would say, explaining some unassigned story.

  She often came to our house in the afternoons, and I would sit in silent fascination while she talked of some book or other with my aunt and my mother. To think of people talking about books as if they made a common language with others outside the family! She was one of the first to read Gone with the Wind, which was published along about that time. She spoke of it once at some length while I eavesdropped. “I don’t consider it the world’s greatest,” she said, agreeing to some observation someone had made, “but it is Southern, about us all, and I think we should honor it for that.”

  Through the years we had had other teachers, underpaid but devoted. It still seems to me especially significant that none of them (well, maybe one or two) had been trained in education courses, but they saw to it anyway that we studied basic subjects like mathematics, algebra, civics, geography, and history. The American history course ran full tilt into the Civil War. Our text was obviously written by a Southerner for young students. The heroic names of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, “Jeb” Stuart, and Nathan Bedford Forrest were liberally evoked. At a certain point before Gettysburg, I remember, Christopher Bryan turned to me and said: “It looks like we’re gonna win, dudn’t it?”

  I was finishing grade ten when Truth, like a warning ghost out of Shakespeare, appeared to the school board: there was no money even for upkeep. The school, a large two-story square brick structure, housed all twelve grades, the high school meeting upstairs, the grammar school distributed below. There were no funds for cleaning, or building fires. Neither was there money to pay the teachers.

  Depression was all we heard about. In Miss Jennie McBride’s primary room, so she told my mother, a small boy kept his overcoat on all day long. She told him twice to take it off and hang it with the others. When he refused, she had him come to the front of the room, and unbuttoned the coat. He wore nothing at all beneath it.

  A family I remember from having seen them walking to and from school wore long black stockings and dark patched pants and jackets, all too small for them. For some reason I never understood they had wads of paper or perhaps cloth stuffed about under the tight clothes. They looked sallow, serious, and hungry, and spoke to no one.

  One entire family came in from the country every school day in a buggy. I went home with them once and had to get up before daylight, as their chores included milking and feeding stock, as well as getting breakfast. One older girl rode her horse in each day. She wore a divided leather skirt, her dress tied up around her waist.

  Country children brought their lunch with them, for we had no school lunches served. The contents of the little sacks or tin buckets were usually sausage and biscuit, sometimes a boiled egg or a slice of homemade cake. Town children went home for lunch. I walked the short distance down the hill, home to a hot meal.

  One day I was given a lunch in a little flowered metal pail, put up in waxed paper—sandwiches, hardboiled egg, and tea-cakes—and told to eat at school. A new girl in our class told me that she lived in a house so large it took all day to walk around it. I couldn’t believe such a thing, so I went there with her. We wound up at the old Bingham house, one of the town’s Victorian mansions, which had recently been cut up into apartments. I saw that it would certainly not require a whole day to walk around it, and concluded she had exaggerated. We came back to afternoon classes.

  I did not know until I got home why I was allowed to take a lunch that day. Now I found out. It was hog-slaughtering time. The little pigs I had seen grow up in their smelly, muddy pen far in the back of the property were now nothing but carcasses hanging upside down from their hind feet, pitifully split open from throat to tail, while strange black men I had never seen circulated around them. Nearby were huge black pots filled with water kept at the boil by fires burning under them. Of course, they had wanted me to miss the slaughter, the throat slitting, the screams, the bloodletting, the realities of meat and sustenance.

  A strange, heavy odor filled the house. From inside our dining room I could hear riotous sounds, and the cook, going in and out the swinging door with full plates of hot bread and platters of something like meat, was happy as Christmas. It seemed like a celebration. Steam poured out from around the doors. I heard my grandfather’s voice. He was in there!

  At one door I waited for a glimpse and got it: a table full of old men, eating and talking, barely visible through the dense steam.

  “Come here,” my mother said, pulling me back to the other wing of the house. “It’s all your grandfather’s friends. They’re eating chit’lings.” Hog entrails, of course. Plenty to go around after the slaughter.

  All in all, it was a strange day. I remember still that one glimpse through dense smoke, the talking heads of those old gentlemen above the plates and platters, a world they understood, with something like mystery and wildness in it, ancient.

  The girl I had accompanied home to see if her tale was true I no longer remember. A transient; I suppose her family left soon after. I remember the day, though, as ceremonial, filled with the thought of killing and blood, kept from me, but actual nonetheless in my memory.

  In those days I knew that people everywhere were hungry, though I think that in our town there was enough to eat. In addition to the pigs, we raised chickens, a staple of the Sunday dinner table. We had milk from our own cows.

  Up on a town street, I sometimes visited a playmate, a girl named Eloise Lee. Here I was amazed to see what to her family was a common occurrence. A knock would come at the door, and someone strange would be standing there, asking for food. Her mother set a plate at a small table on the back porch and invited the person in to eat. Whatever was given, the wanderers would be grateful for, then would go on their way. I suppose this scene was repeated everywhere along main roads. Since our house was harder to reach, no one I can remember came there.

  However, one winter Dad planted a whole acre of turnip greens in the field just beyond our drive. He put an ad in the town paper:

  ALL YOU CAN EAT!

  Anybody hungry can come down

  to the Spencer place and pick a gunny sack full

  of turnip greens!

  Four or five times a day, people would wander down our road, gather greens in the field and leave with a full sack over one shoulder. Turnip greens with turnips attached are full of iron, and sustaining. In the South the habit was to put a slice of pork “side meat” in the pot with the greens, chop up the turnips, and serve the whole as a main dish, supported by potlikker and corn bread. One never outgrows the taste for it, but in those lean days it was a winter staple of life itself. Summers were easier. Anybody with the slightest initiative could plant tomatoes, corn, peas, beans, okra, squash, beets—anything at all would grow. And anybody could go fishing.

  But summer was at hand and the school had no money to open in the fall.

/>   Dad at this point pulled one of his greatest coups. North Carrollton—north town, we called it—was right across the creek from us. The attitude that prevailed was that it was never to be confused or mistaken for us. We were the county seat, the upper crust, the old families, the snobs. North Carrollton had grown up around the C. & G. railroad. Big Sand Creek, a willful stream that ran any way it wanted to, had so many curves in it that the railroad, in order to pass through Carrollton, would have had to build a number of bridges. It was also the case in Carrollton that the whole town sat, like Rome, on a number of hills. So the railroad took the easy route, and the train station was reached only by driving through North Carrollton.

  North Carrollton had its own twelve-year school. It also had its own post office, mayor, and board of aldermen, and its own Methodist and Baptist churches. So much of contest and hostile feeling prevailed between the two towns, each with a population of scarcely five hundred souls, that annual basketball games might easily turn into fistfights. Carrollton families with school-age children swore that their children would never “cross the creek.”

  However, our school had no money.

  My father knew the state superintendant of education and invited him home for dinner one day. The project he proposed in strict secrecy was simple. North town was not to be asked for anything. Proud Carrollton was not to appear as a supplicant. But if the schools could be consolidated, letting North Carrollton become the high school, Carrollton house the grammar school, side benefits from consolidation, such as school buses and state programs and “funding,” could enhance the educational picture for both schools, and for the county in general, as so many children either attended one-room schools in small rural communities or came in from the country by any means they could find.

  Both boards then met, and the state superintendant, carefully coached by my father in local history, grievances, grudges, and ill will, presented the case to each. A victory!

  Several families carried out their vow and kept their children away from contamination by the common people in north town. They sent them away to high school in Greenwood, a Delta town eighteen miles away. I was expected to be democratic and remain.

  I was fairly used to north town. There was, of course, the Chevrolet agency and the cotton gin. Gan had walked me “downtown” every afternoon throughout my childhood, stopping to talk with the men around the barbershop and the drugstore. Now, though the way to school was longer, I could usually catch a ride with Dad to come home for the midday meal.

  The change for me turned out well. The children my age I met there and studied with were not a mean bunch, and I felt myself liked and accepted for the first time. “Our” teachers had been part of the deal. We considered them, quite rightly, to be a superior lot, Miss Peacock prime among them, and though a new superintendant for the combined schools was chosen to come in and oil troubled waters, I don’t recall that any of the predicted conflicts took place.

  It now seems to me, looking back, that maybe Carrollton, that haughty old town, had got tired not only of being stuck-up but of being anything at all. It still had its fine old names and its beautiful houses with their antiques, its family stories of a glorious past; but all was fading along with the upholstery and the damask draperies, gathering tarnish like the put-away sets of silver.

  I don’t think that “decadence” is a word to apply. I believe Carrollton was always Carrollton, and so it remained. As it resisted any progress, so it refused any change at all. Of course, like any other living thing, it grows older. However, it declines because of the declensions of mortality—and that is a different thing from decadence. Something there, bred in the bone, resists being anything at all except just what it was and is: Carrollton.

  Through the years it stays fixed, shrinking up, season by season. Recently an apparent boom has come because of the all-white Carroll Academy, which hundreds of children are bused in from the Delta to attend. There are new homes on the hills near the interstate, and new bungalows among the old houses along the old streets. But all this is hardly Carrollton, which grows ever more ghostlike, more at one with the little family cemeteries behind the oldest homes than with anything new and thriving.

  I felt uncommonly at home among the students in newly named J. Z. George High School. (Senator George was a harmonious choice, a U.S. senator from the county we could all claim.) Many students now came in on buses from the country.

  We could afford a band director. So Mr. Wood came trumpeting in, friendly with all and sundry, loaded with instruments in worn leatherette cases, which we could borrow at first, then rent, or buy. He had a son named Billy I even “dated” for a time, another older one named Ross. I took up playing clarinet just to go along with the general excitement, and though I was prone to blow squawks as often as notes, I was more than covered by the first clarinet, Wilton Sanders, a north-town boy whose father owned a grocery store. We would pile into the back of a pickup and ride at night to play for games or occasions at other schools, buying hamburgers along the way and coming back sleepy but happy.

  We had a football team!

  The coach was a tall, handsome young man named Joe Stevens. All the girls were smitten instantly. He had played on the Ole Miss team, and in addition to coaching our new team, he was to teach typing. All of us signed up for typing. The class met in the afternoons in the typing lab. Before each of us was a typewriter and a manual with assigned exercises. Mr. Stevens would walk in, glance around long enough to check the roll, write “Do Exercise 4” on the blackboard and walk out to coach football. We would sit there typing “f f f space/g g g space” over and over. Mr. Stevens took one look, it seemed, at an attractive blond history teacher named Mary Ida Lee and was hooked for life. Their marriage was a long and happy one. I learned to type.

  During those last two years in high school my life filled up in a way I had never before experienced. My cousin May, Uncle Tom’s daughter, fresh out of college, had been hired for her first job, teaching in our grammar school. She was pretty, cheerful, well-read, and marvelous fun to talk to. All the young men around began to telephone her, though she was in love with a Winona man she later married. We talked interminably of books and movies and places we’d like to see. It was the start of a lifelong friendship.

  I was enjoying a rich and mostly secret fantasy life, no longer based on Greek myths and King Arthur. Predictably (I now suppose), I got involved with movies. The picture show, we called it.

  I know exactly when it started. I was riding my horse one wintry afternoon and stopped back by the Carrollton drugstore for something, when I saw a magazine called Movie Mirror with a picture of Jean Harlow on the cover. I bought it. The glamorous star was making headlines because she had changed her platinum hair for “brownette.” I read avidly about this momentous alteration of an international image. I read everything else I could get hold of. I fell to dreaming of being “one of those” and having dates with Clark Gable, Ronald Colman, or Bing Crosby—an odd assortment of favorites. I never talked about all this, I suppose because I knew how silly it was.

  Going to the picture show had always been a favored diversion, both for my aunt and uncle on Teoc and my mother in town, who would be persuaded to drive me to Greenwood if I schemed it right. She had an enduring childlike interest in plots and stories, and even in the stars, whom she took certain likes and dislikes to, remarking that somebody like “Jo-Ann” Crawford was “too coarse,” or that “Old Bing” had big ears but could certainly sing. It may even be she had movie-star fantasies as well, though I doubt it.

  Along with the movies, purveying scenes of emotional trauma amid plush decor, there was the radio, loaded with crooning about love (the eternal kind), parting, sorrow, laments of every variety. The sprightly tunes were many, as were Hollywood comedies, but the prevailing mood was torchy and very bad for young girls. I concluded that love was something you got heartache about. Maybe it was my early failure to feel anywhere near as attractive as I would have liked that made me k
now from the start I would never really fall for anybody around home. No, it would be somebody strange in a distant, romantic place. That would have been fine, but I wasn’t in any such place and had no prospects of going to one.

  I did learn something about myself when in school in north town that I never put in words but felt just the same. I was really a country girl. Teoc and McCarley, in my case, had prevailed over Carrollton. My strong roots were in them. I still look back with admiration to the names of our Presbyterian families who came “all the way in” to Sunday school and church—the Stan-fords, the Willifords, the Shacklefords, the Wiltshires, the Brownings. There was even a family called Turnipseed. Good plain strong names of people who were not petty or derisive to others. If this is an Anglo-Saxon bias, then it has to be that, but who wants to reject or be ashamed of the rock they’re hewn from?

  During those last years in high school, a cousin named Lloyd Smith drove a pickup that had been licensed as a school bus for his neighborhood. The students who rode with him sat on wooden benches along either side in the back. Everyone, including Lloyd, had the look of wanting to get home before they had to milk cows in the dark. I used to hitch a ride with him to the back of our property, and go talking all the way. I liked him. I felt I might happily have been one of them all. Anytime I’ve made some foolish effort to be more “sophisticated” than I naturally am, or in any way scornful of people who might seem to be inferior, I feel shame for it and find it hard to forgive myself for what others have undoubtedly long since forgotten.

  15

  SOME SOCIAL NOTES

  THERE were three families named Gee in Carrollton when I was growing up, all one family really, sons of “old Major Gee,” who I suppose had been in the Civil War.

  They all had money the old major had left them, and property around the town. They ran a store named for the major, O. K. Gee 8c Sons. The full name was Ormand Kimbrough Gee, but the pun was significant. The store was on the corner across from the courthouse. A mulberry tree stood there with benches beneath it. Known as “mulberry corner,” it got to be famous in the state because so many passers-by would stand or sit there, talking politics.