Landscapes of the Heart

by Elizabeth Spencer

  One year, unthinkably, my father fired Charles. He had not done anything wrong, and the only reason for letting him go was money. Dad thought he could not afford him. Charles got a job on the town roadworks. Once, passing in the car, my sister-in-law and I saw him working with the town crew to repair a water main on our street. “We miss you, Charles,” I said. Charles laughed. “Oh, I’ll be back ‘fo long, Miss ‘Lizbet. He can’t do without me.” Sure enough, a week or so later, Charles returned.

  At Christmas we all felt the obligation, also a pleasure, to find good presents for Bill and Charles and Snookums. We wrapped them carefully, and they were placed with all the others under the tree. At the tree ceremony on Christmas morning, they would come in with the rest of us and stand around, saying “Thank you, ma’am,” or “Thank you, sir,” and smiling. But they opened the packages only later, out of sight.

  The small dining room where as a family we usually ate our daily meals, instead of setting up the large dining room beyond, was adjacent to the kitchen, and the life and talk of the kitchen were part of our meals. When we spoke among ourselves, those in the kitchen did not interrupt, and the same went for them. But there was considerable exchange. A death or an illness, an elopement, the effects of a storm, who was in town from the outside, “they” would have heard before we did.

  The burden of the talk was almost invariably of the white community. Since the blacks worked throughout town in white homes, and since of course they talked with one another, it was easy to learn from them. But their tact was infinite. They knew when and how far to trust us, when to be frank, when to praise, when to be silent. In retrospect, I now read a lot into their silences. Who knew what life was going on among “them”?

  Literally speaking, Carrollton did not have a Negro section. The houses for the blacks had simply grown up on or peripheral to the white properties. The large white houses of Carrollton were generally set on hillsides surrounded by enormous yards, full of flowering shrubs, the front walks lined with cedars, the fences fringed with jonquils, narcissus, and other bulbs. So as the town had taken shape in the old days, some of the houses for blacks wound up along the main residential roads of the town.

  There was, however, one exclusively black section, located in the far rear of the Welch property, next door to ours. Many white houses were within calling distance of it, but it was visible neither from any house nor any road, and could be reached by climbing a steep path up a hillside from the town road that ran back of our property. That path was like a gash in the eroded red soil.

  I had been to this section a time or two, I suppose, for I remember it. It was composed of a group of fairly large unpainted houses, with porches, all around a central area. As was done around most black dwellings at that time, the ground was scraped clean of every shred of grass. There may have been some plots for flowers, outlined with snuff bottles, planted with prince feathers, marigolds, or zinnias. There may have been marble holes for children to play in, or a swing made of an old rubber tire hanging from a tree limb.

  This then, like a little African village within the town, carried on its own mysterious life. I was sternly enjoined never to go there unless sent on an errand, and then to go no farther than the edges. It was easy to forget it was even there. The name of it was Buzzard Roost. If any outsider asked about the colored section, my mother would tell them about it by name, but she would invariably add, “They named it themselves,” which was true. But explaining was another sign of her making up for the gulf between us, the one there was no bridging.

  Laura lived back in Buzzard Roost along with others of the Henley Negroes. They were said by some to be dangerous, “mean Negroes,” I often heard, and part Indian. I can believe the latter, as they had brownish-red skin. But Laura was never mean that I can recall. She could sometimes get outdone and yell out the window to J.C. and me, “Y’all churren stop that!” “What are they doing, Laura?” “Chunkin’ one ’nother. Lord have mercy, they’s a sight!”

  One of my happiest memories is of Laura and my mother. Many years after she stopped cooking for us, she would come at times to visit and exchange her news with ours. It was a mild spring day, warm and full of good odors, under a fair sky, new grass springing up, a fresh, vivid green. My father had a pile of new lumber in the field in front of our house, ready for Charles to build fencing, and down there Laura found my mother, who had gone to the field for some reason. I could see them from the house, how Mimi and Laura were talking, at times seriously, at times laughing, Mimi sitting on the woodpile, Laura wandering about nearby as they talked. This went on for a good long while, a pleasant sight.

  I see their meeting and talk as being much like the daily aspect and mood of the conversations from small dining room to kitchen, not even yards of space between, and yet, as remarked on later, when things in the South came to the boil, that little agreed-upon space could not be closed. We could not ever go sit in the kitchen to eat with “them,” nor could “they” sit at our dinner table, though we were eating precisely the same food. For one thing, there would have been no enjoyable small talk, nothing exchanged, nothing spontaneous to say. For another, if we had initiated such a move, we would have felt wrong about it. This is an odd thing to call wrong, but there isn’t another word.

  Once at an early age, I got excited about the Fourth of July. I can’t remember why I was so stirred up; maybe an idea had simply arrived unannounced in my own head. Bill Burkhead was the subject. Why did Bill have to work every day? Even on Sundays, here he would come, walking in from a more distant group of Negro houses, back of the Charlie Gee property, a whole mile, to chop wood and build fires in the morning, then return in the late afternoon to milk and feed. Why did Bill never have a holiday? Why not let him have the Fourth of July?

  Now, for one thing, the Fourth was never celebrated in Mississippi in my growing-up time because Vicksburg had fallen to General Grant on that day. The Fourth was a reminder of that, and of other tragic losses. So it was deemed a Yankee holiday. All this I knew very well, but thought it only appropriate, since Bill was not a slave because of the war, that he ought to have the day off. I pronounced what I thought at the table.

  Dad and Mimi took it lightly. There was no direct answer. They often enjoyed me, I think, and thought I was “original” and in a childish way “funny.” I kept it up. Why not? “Well,” one of them finally said, “what would he do with it?” “Anything he wanted to,” I said. But the argument was put to nothing. I was finally told to hush. “If Bill had a day off,” my father declared, laying down his napkin with his familiar air of ending a discussion for good and all, “he wouldn’t know what to do with it. He would come up here anyway. That’s exactly what would happen.” With this he rose and left the room.

  Then there was the crime, the old crime, the one nobody ever talked about…

  When did I first learn about it? I think out of bits of conversation, overheard, half-heard, not clearly understood. “In the courthouse wall,” was a repeated phrase. But what was in the courthouse wall? At what age did I first actually see it—the shattered plaster, left just as it had been at the end of a fateful day, the gray lathes exposed beneath, pocked with countless bullet holes? “Well, there was a shooting.” “Who did they shoot?” “These Negroes.” “Why?” “Well, things had gotten out of hand.” “What things?” “We never knew the straight of it.” Or “We weren’t mixed up in it.” Or “It all happened long ago.” “Then why leave the bullet holes?” “I don’t know.”

  Then I would forget all about it. But in some context or other it would surface again, more fearful details would be told, others given as speculation on what might have happened, what was rumored to have caused it, what terrors had arisen out of what facts or dark suspicions, until finally I even learned that it had a name: the Carrollton massacre.*

  So what exactly was it, this massacre? Once I had a name for it, I could make a search through old publications until real information appeared, and so eventually I did. It s
hould be quickly told.

  In 1886, two Negroes in the country out from Carrollton brought a charge against a white man and several of his friends. The charge was for assault with intent to murder. The trial was to be held in the courtroom upstairs in the courthouse. Though warned not to attend, a number of Negroes came anyway.

  While the trial was in progress, fifty or more white men, armed with shotguns and rifles, rode into town, rushed into the courtroom, and began firing. Ten Negroes were killed at once; others tried to escape by jumping out of the windows, but many were wounded and died later. It was declared that the Negroes were armed and intended to start a fight, but no proof of the claim has been offered, and no white was injured.

  In a state just emerging from Reconstruction, where a lynching was accorded only a line or two in local papers, if any notice at all, an outcry of horror and shame against “the murderous mob at Carrollton” appeared everywhere in the press. There were demands for investigation and punishment. It was said that names should be known and perpetrators hunted down. But so far as I ever heard, nothing of the sort was ever done.

  At last, however, my private jigsaw puzzle of the actual event was complete. But no explanation has ever been given for leaving the bullet holes left by that mob, never plastered or papered over, plainly evident in the walls of the courtroom, where cases are tried and justice is sought. As late as the fifties the scars were still there. Word has it that some “redecoration” was completed in the courtroom, as late as 1992. Why not before?

  It is a primal mystery of Carrollton, haunting me still.

  A memory (from age nine, or ten, or eleven?): To my mother: “Did they ever have a Ku Klux Klan around here?”

  “They did, yes. Your father went to one meeting and came home and said he wouldn’t join. He saw what they were doing, and he didn’t like it.”

  To Uncle Joe (shortly after): “Did they ever have a Ku Klux Klan around here?”

  “They did, yes. But when I heard about it, I said to Father, ‘I’m not going to have anything to do with it.’ He said, ‘I don’t blame you, Son. I wouldn’t either.’ “

  When Hallie Eggleston retired from her librarian’s position at Ole Miss, she came back to Carrollton, saw her sister Frances through a fatal illness, and lived alone in the Eggleston house. She was always the same, except that in her last years her memory was a little out of kilter.

  Hallie hired and then made a companion of a black girl named Ida Bean. I think Ida Bean was one of the Buzzard Roost residents. She never worked for us, but I always knew about Ida Bean. My mother used to say that whenever you saw Ida Bean, she was in the middle of a crowd and they were all laughing.

  Ida Bean began to drive for Miss Hallie. They became the best of friends. Hallie loved to go on trips—she lived “with her foot in the road,” as the saying went. Ida Bean would drive her. Here and there they went, inseparable. They brought flowers and produce in from country places; they searched out sites and towns to visit, and friends of long ago. When people worried about Hallie, the saying went, “But then she does have Ida Bean.” I passed them both once, getting into Hallie’s car together, Ida Bean loading some packages in. “Now you wants this one here, and this one over there.” It is nice to think about a friendship like that.

  The Negroes on the family plantation at Teoc were different from the town Negroes mainly because they believed in spooks. “Ha’nts,” they called them. After supper in winter, I would sneak into the kitchen where the wage hands, who regularly ate their dinners at the kitchen table, would linger around the huge fireplace, still smoldering with a few unspent logs, and talk in low voices about what they had seen, perhaps that very day.

  “Brer Meuks was out there standing by the garden gate. I seen him just as plain as day.”

  They were talking about Armistead Meuks, my aunt’s ancient gardener, dead for several years.

  Lucille, the cook, said that yesterday she saw where a white sheet drying on a line had fallen to the ground. It rose up and went away, a good ways off, then fell down flat again.

  There were numbers of stories, not every night, but pretty often. I remember the strong black heads, round as cannonballs, in the darkening room—this was before electric power, and the main house was lighted with gas flares—how they seemed to float up in the fading firelight. I remember the soft slurred voices. Lucille would be seated at the table, telling her share of tales. I would be seated off in a corner, all ears, scared to go back through the passages to the dining room, from the dining room back into the house, though, sooner or later, I must. A ha’nt would march before me, sure as anything; a spook would grab me by the neck.

  I went fishing in summers with a Negro woman named Alice. Alice talked almost continually with spirits. They were there along with us, evidently. We had our fishing poles, our bait in one bucket, another bucket with dried cow manure, burning, a smudge for mosquitoes.

  Alice had one troubled and quarrelsome voice for the spirits, another high-pitched, affectionate voice for me. I often had to wait until she would wave a hand before her face, saying “Go ‘way now, y’all go ‘way,” before she would listen to anything I said. They were evidently pressing her for attention.

  No one ever seemed to think I was in danger going with Alice into the swamps to catch little catfish and crawfish (“craw-dads”), but later on, after Aunt Esther died and Uncle Joe remarried, she was overheard loudly plotting the murder of his second wife while sweeping the porch.

  18

  COLLEGE

  TIMES away from Carrollton and Teoc were few, but memorable. I was sent away to camp in the mountains; I was sent away to college. The camp was Presbyterian, and so was the college. In some important respects, I never left home at all. They might as well have picked up our house and the church and moved them first to Montreat, North Carolina, then to Jackson, Mississippi.

  Yet pretty clothes had been liberally bought for me and large suitcases packed with some excitement. I was stowed away among all my possessions new and old, in the family car for transport a hundred miles south to Belhaven College in Jackson.

  New worlds might be in store, even if the college president was married to my father’s cousin. He was a Presbyterian minister named Guy Gillespie. So the same religion as I had at home was about to be drummed once again into girlish ears.

  Belhaven was set in a spacious campus opening out from a white-pillared mansion that dated from the olden times. This building, enlarged and made into a dormitory, faced a twin edifice across a pond, where large goldfish lazed and waterlilies bloomed at twilight. The grounds were extensive, including a lake for boating and long afternoon walks. Pine trees towered up on the rolling land; meadows and playing fields provided the aspect of an estate. The rules were strict. One classmate of mine was “campused” for eighteen weeks when she was caught smoking a cigarette. Another little bunch caught dancing in the Christian Association parlor met the same fate.

  But when it came to getting an education, there was nothing terribly wrong with Belhaven College. Dr. Gillespie (Cousin Guy) thought of all of the three hundred or so girls in the student body as his daughters, one could only suppose. Attendance to his chapel sermons twice a week was obligatory. Rolls were checked, and dozing or letter writing was spied out and reprimanded.

  I was there to excel in my books, make new friends, and enjoy sports, and so on and so forth. I was there to get a degree that would help me in finding work after I graduated. The place itself was beautiful, and the faculty, though required to be practicing and believing Christians, did not have to be Presbyterian. Many were. Years later, a Catholic friend remarked that I might as well have been sent to a convent. He was right.

  However, Jackson itself was there surrounding us. The Belhaven Conservatory was well known and had a fine reputation. Those in the Jackson musical community came and went, and many of our music faculty were part of their society. I never remember catching the bus to town but that I hear sounding after me: “Ah ah Ah AH ah ah
ah” from the open windows of the conservatory.

  Infrequently traveling companies of theater from New York arrived, and we went in chaperoned busloads. Gertrude Lawrence came in Skylark. That afternoon, on Capital Street, a critic for the local paper was hurrying up and down announcing to all he passed, “I had lunch with Gertude Lawrence! You may touch me!” Katharine Hepburn came in The Philadelphia Story. Joseph Cotton and Van Heflin appeared with her. Reporters at the airport must have said the wrong things to Hepburn. She said she would pose for a picture, then held a tennis racket up before her face. We had to interpret such behavior as connoting contempt for Jackson, perhaps for all of Mississippi: Who knew how “they” felt about us? Nothing good was the message we got.

  There was also the local talent, represented by the Jackson Little Theatre. We were allowed to go, for supporting local efforts was judged a civic duty. Here I saw some good plays for the first time—Street Scene, The Time of Your Life, some naughty comedies of Noel Coward’s. I remember vividly a receiving line of local people greeting us for an opening-night performance. Among them was a thin man with a distracted, sensitive face. I learned later that this was the painter William Hollingsworth. He was only months away from his death by suicide. Books on his scenes from Mississippi life have now been published; I own two of his paintings.

  In literature classes—I would, of course, major in English—the emphasis was on the older works: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, with large helpings of the romantic poets. I continued to study Latin, taught by a buxom maiden lady, Miss Annie McBride.

  Miss Annie gave Roman dinners for her Latin students once a year. We dressed in long tunics, and so astonishingly garbed trailed along in the late afternoon toward the dining hall. Here in one of the parlors, we reclined on couches, partaking of grapes, exotic fruits like kumquats, dried figs, and other treats thought to be Roman. No wine was offered—grape juice again—and we tried to speak in Latin phrases, addressing one another as “Domina Spencer,” “Domina McBride,” “Domina Murphy,” etc.