On the Gulf

by Elizabeth Spencer

  A few miles beyond I would come to the really spooky place, Pine Hills, an old resort hotel, set in extensive grounds just at the head of Bay St. Louis. It was begun during a boom year, 1926, and some people around Pass Christian had told me that it never opened, thus awakening in my mind images of fabulous chateaux, villas, castles, or mansions, richly prepared for expected guests, the snow-white linens starched and spread, the place settings of china, crystal and silver all laid, the bedrooms expectant and fragrant, the staff coached, the management ready with smiles. Then—no one comes. All that is largely fantasy, of course; the hotel went down as an operating venture in the crash of 1929 and never re-opened. Until a couple of years ago, it still stood, empty and expectant.

  To go there alone past the entrance gates, observe the small filling station with pumps for gas still in place, and toward the far right outbuildings of every sort standing vacant—stables? garages? servants’ quarters?—the tennis courts all weedy silence, and most of all to see looming straight ahead, the massive hotel itself, windows by the hundreds with no one behind them, the curving entrance drive where no arriving guests would ever alight, no door ever swing wide to receive them—this was awesome.

  It was told to me that the long room to the left of the entrance lobby had been the banquet hall. I once crept close enough to see if the tables were, as I had been told, still prepared for dinner, but I don’t recall confirmation of the tale. Perhaps to anyone able actually to enter those dusky halls and cobwebbed lobbies, details would have opened out, a pen ready beside a blank registration page, a key forgotten in a cabinet for vases, one final ashtray left unemptied on a table. Who knows?

  Rounding a corner of the hotel, one came suddenly into a full view of Bay St. Louis. Came only to learn that others before the hotel builders had felt the command and sweep of this site. A towering shell mound, said to be the largest on the coast, still stood for marvelling at. Even more than the hotel, it held its Indian mystery, of how it came to be put there, for what impressive purpose. At least the hotel planners had the sense to leave it alone. Perhaps they thought of it as a curiosity for the guests to look at, strolling at twilight in full evening dress before cocktails and dinner. Now both monuments—hotel and mound—stand side by side, looking out over the bay. And the bay may well be asking itself who will come next to rear a monument and pass away.

  My other favorite spot to visit—far over to the east in Ocean Springs—was, in contrast, very much a going concern. The Shearwater Pottery was owned and run by the Anderson family. It wasn’t all that easy to find. You had to know where to look. You reached the house from a street in Ocean Springs, having searched carefully to see a modest sign, just a little plank nailed to a tree, saying “Shear-water Pottery” and sporting the painted logo of a gull at wing. The drive to reach it wound through shaggy growth, small oaks, azaleas, Cherokee rose bushes and camellias—all looking never to have been planted or tended, part of the wild. A turn and there was the Anderson house, modest like the sign, but beautiful in its traditional Gulf Coast architecture, the gables, the slanted roof, the porch. The pottery itself was in a shed-like building. Nearby was the shop, where the various figurines designed here were displayed along with vases, jardinières, plates. The designs, taken from the natural life that lay all around, had in their movement, the humor and rhythm of their execution, a totally original quality. Since those days it has come into full light how great an artist was at work here. Locally known and protected—he evidently was the sort of eccentric people fear may come to harm—coast people during his lifetime certainly prized him. But I doubt if any friend or neighbor or visitor knew the extent, let alone the magnificence of Walter Anderson’s art. He seemed, like the Lord God before him, to be creating every day, fish, fowl, plants, flowers, trees, sea and air, leaving behind him such abundance at his death that the Gulf Coast needs to find no other means to immortality.

  I used to see them—him or one of his brothers, sometimes both, though which brother I never quite got straight. They were in and out of the shop, not looking so much distracted as alive to other matters than who came in to buy. Yet you could talk with them, ask questions which were cordially and briefly answered. They went about in old dungarees, canvas shoes, denim shirts, a pull-over in winter. This was right for them. I brought people there who came to visit me. Some of their figurines which I bought there—“widgets” they called them—have gone with me on many moves. A wing may break from a gull or a foot from a dancing black man, and have to be mended, but the charm, the humor of execution remain intact. I have a watercolor painting of a brilliant rooster, standing on big yellow feet, flaunting his tail feathers of purple and gold.

  Since Walter Anderson’s death in 1965, exhibitions of his work have travelled to many cities, and books of his “logs” and art continue to appear.

  So these were the poles, the Bay and old hotel, speaking of a little understood past, and the Shearwater Pottery, alive with the present mystery of art continuing its course.

  But there was also the inner private mystery of my own—the romance that went wrong, the relationship that could not survive. It’s in life, not in literature, that we learn about irony. Before I left the coast in the spring of 1952, I made a bonfire of love letters in the yard behind my apartment in Pass Christian, and found the smoke useful for standing in to keep off the mosquitoes, which were especially hungry back there.

  The second irony I must mention is bolder, bigger, and not to be survived. Many years later, that very spot where I caught my breath to see the Gulf in all its expanse and glory, found itself in the target eye of a destruction so complete the coast as we knew it could never be restored. Its name was Hurricane Camille.

  Other hurricanes, memorable ones, had struck the area. One in 1947 burst the sea wall to bits; it was replaced by a man-made beach of white sand. Betsy, in 1965, swept the beach away; it was built up again. But to Camille, all such efforts might have been sand castles left by a child. It was repeated too often to be false that here was the most powerful hurricane ever to strike the continent, none stronger to be found in any record or in human memory.

  I was living in 1969 in Montreal, but I saw more than enough of it on tv. I saw the few cars that crept through a world that was falling, not vertically down, but bursting apart horizontally, trees, buildings and telephone poles fighting like wild cats through the haze of wind and water to remain, slowly losing a nightlong battle. I saw evacuation moving massively along the highways north, heard stations fading from the air, until all communication like threads snipped one by one, was cut. I was left in the distant northern dark, to dream of other horrors still—my favorite old mansions crashing to flinders, little piers lifted from their pilings to coil like whips in the storm’s fury, giant oaks with their roots nakedly exposed. But whatever I could imagine would still be less than the actual disasters of August 17, 1969.

  Further shocks awaited when I returned to the area in the summer of 1970 to do a reading at Gulf Park, a junior college whose solid concrete buildings had survived the holocaust. I flew to New Orleans and rode to Gulfport on the bus. As we approached the coast through the marshy land east of New Orleans, I heard a woman talking behind me to someone she was sitting by. She had had to wait out the hurricane in Biloxi, at the hospital bedside of her father, who was too ill to be moved. “It was something more than natural,” she kept repeating. “It was like one of them bomb experiments done got loose. It was just a lot more awful than anything natural could be.” The tremor in her voice made me think that it had come that night and would not leave her.

  Not that I could blame her. The bus reached Bay St. Louis and crossed the bridge. Here to the right was open water, calm and innocent, but to the left everything had changed. The shoreline and the road were at least twenty yards higher than before, and everything that had stood to the right of the road had vanished. A wonderful alley of oaks, a cool tunnel of bearded moss, was simply gone, as were the noble white houses just beyond them, an
d all their gardens. Double staircases, high verandahs like a dream of long summer afternoons, tall white-painted fences with wrought-iron gates, all were gone. Only walk-ways remained.

  Just back of the bare re-routed beach drive, I later saw whole groves of pine trees reduced to blackened stumps as though burnt-over land. I was told that sand driven by winds that had reached 200 miles an hour (and probably much more: instruments at the time could go no higher), had blackened whatever it struck. How far back did the monster range, how far along the coast had it foraged? Sickened by the loss I saw, I didn’t want to hear any more statistics. The real message was written already in the ragged shoreline, the disappearance of the little Pass Christian Yacht Club with brave flags and trim marina, the few stricken and displaced houses which had somehow got through. This place was finished. “Gone with the wind,” is waiting to be wryly said here. It may be in order to observe with Camille, with her demure name like a Southern belle, did a better job than Sherman.

  I knew I must write about all this some day. I had already done a number of stories—most of them in these pages—about various points along the Gulf or in the Caribbean. The writer A. J. Leibling, who loved the area, insisted that the Caribbean was this hemisphere’s Mediterranean Sea. I agree. Its ways of life, its mystery, belong to the sea and create life styles and outlooks which are totally, rhythmically different from what we think of as our own “normal” ways of living.

  But beyond all that, it was the hurricane itself, its wild force and aftermath, that stayed with me and finally grew into the novel The Salt Line, which I was many years in writing. I took a number of trips to the coast, lingering for weeks at the time. I heard hundreds of stories from people I knew who lived there. I read through innumerable accounts in the all new library in Gulfport. I even went out once more to Ship Island. The lighthouse was gone, no victim of Camille, which she had somehow gallantly weathered, but burnt down, I was told, by some boys on a lark. The island itself had been split in two parts by the storm. Now land which had offered the first harbor the French explorers had found, the scene of historic wartime events, decades of Sunday School picnics, and countless romantic afternoons, was two diminished little islands with the sea flowing between.

  Back at Pass Christian the little Gothic-style white painted Episcopal church in its grove of oaks was gone—the rector, I learned, had seen his wife and child drowned in the tidal wave, while he held to the front steps and reached out vainly to bring them in.

  But worse than all this was to see what was now moving into this lost world. Condos and shopping centers, Holiday Inns and Howard Johnsons and Best Westerns, Wendy’s and Waffle Houses. A few new houses with no friendly groves to nestle in.

  Ocean Springs, however, I found to my delight, was little touched. Biloxi had a charming new square. There were little theatres springing up, the old Magnolia Hotel was a showplace gallery for colorful coastal painting, and some new shops showed sensitivity to the locale. Best of all, the Shearwater Pottery had been spared. It was still to be reached by its shaggy winding road, and there I discovered what others had found after the death of Walter Anderson. A hidden treasure was in a small cottage adjacent to the main house and the pottery, where he had lived in later years quite alone, his place of refuge.

  This singular man had died soon after sitting through Hurricane Betsy in 1965 out on Horn Island. He had gone out on purpose to get as close as possible to the invader. It is well known that Horn Island, like the cottage, was his special province. He had rowed out to it often, stayed there for weeks at the time, kept a journal about his experiences and, of course, painted and drew its creatures, plants, flowers, sand and sea. The hurricane to him must have been one more visiting live thing. He died soon after the experience of it, though not before rejoicing in his logs:

  Never has there been a hurricane more respectable, provided with all the portents, predictions, omens, etc., etc. The awful sunrise—no one could fail to take a warning from it—the hovering black spirit bird (man o’war)—only one—(comme il faut)….

  In the cottage (now forbidden to visitors without special permission), I saw the room he had painted entirely in murals, the walls speaking everywhere in brilliant colors, of his vision of the coast, its myth and its reality. The book that reproduces these astonishing works is called A Painter’s Psalm. I know of no greater work anywhere in this country—we may safely go to Europe for achievement to compare to it.

  The character central to The Salt Line, Arnold Carrington, also has a vision of the coast. Regretting Camille’s destruction, he tries to restore. Many of his feelings are echoes of my own:

  … the old pre-hurricane Coast: shrimp boats and ancient oaks, camellias in bloom, flags flying from the old white lighthouse, moonlight on the Sound, softly blowing curtains of Spanish moss … where to find this unity of house, shade, and sun … the brick walk, the moss barely stirring to its familiar breeze of this hour, this peace and precious past….

  No, it can never return, but one thing does remain intact—the air and light.

  Lafcadio Hearn: This strange gulf air “compels awe—something vital, something holy, something pantheistic.”

  The novelist John William DeForrest spoke of the “atmospheric magic” of the Gulf.

  The architect Louis Sullivan declaimed on the “luxury of peace within the velvety carressing air.”

  If only that Interstate No. 10 had not come so close! These great speedways pull like a current; they warp whatever lies nearby.

  I read in a recent review of some of my own books, that I set The Salt Line on the Gulf Coast, better known as the “redneck Riviera.” I was thunderstruck. Was not even enough left standing to correct this coarse ignorance of the past? Was this the post-hurricane phrase that could actually be thought to apply?

  I hope I never hear anyone say it. I will wish curses down upon him. He, too, shall one day be in a hurricane’s target eye.

  —ELIZABETH SPENCER

  ON THE GULF

  Mary Dee went out in the heat in the early afternoon and began to swing. Back and forth, back and forth, sitting with her skirt around her, flying open and shut. It was something to do.

  Semmes, their old colored woman, came out and said, “Don’t swing so high, Dee-dee. It worries your mama.”

  “She’s on the other side,” said Mary Dee, swooping past.

  There was a daytime moon. When she went her highest, her tennis shoes rested on it.

  “Them folks coming from N’Orlens. You know how your mama is about company.”

  “Wears her out,” said Mary Dee, and getting tired, her hair damp and hot, she let the cat die. It died slow as anything, then she was scarcely moving over the bare place in the grass where you pushed, and then she turned around until the ropes wound tightly around each other, going higher and higher. She let herself go, spinning. She did that three times.

  “Your head swimming, I bet,” said Semmes. She was sitting down now, a little way off, in a lawn chair.

  “Whyn’t you go to the pool?” Semmes asked.

  “It’s too late. Time I get there.”

  “Ain’t no more than three-thirty.”

  “Ain’t you got to cook?”

  “Certainly I do. Got to start in.”

  “Who’s coming?” Mary Dee asked, the first she’d thought to wonder. At the table when there was company she sat and said, “Yes, ma’am,” and “No, ma’am”; her mother liked it that way.

  “Them Meades,” said Semmes. “Comes every summer. Eats like horses.”

  “It’s cool out here; over there it’s hot,” Mary Dee said.

  “Ain’t that entirely. They counts on my dinner, Dee-dee.” She looked toward the house. It was two-story, red brick, old, with a big side yard where they were. It was afternoon-still. Way up in the live oak, even the Spanish moss looked as sound asleep at that hour as a dog would be. “Any minute now, Miss Annie going to get out of that bed and start straightening up.”

  “When I grow up
I’m not going to worry any.” Mary Dee started spinning the other way.

  “One time them Meades come and got into rain crossing the Pearl. Rain like brickbats; hail big as eggs. I’d a-turnt back, been me. No, sir! Car dented all over the roof with hail. Hail that big around. Chunks big enough to put in the highballs, which they did. Frozen solid.”

  Mary Dee stopped. “How’d they get it?”

  “It skips, don’t you know. Goes bouncing along. Put their hand out the car window and caught it. That’s how. Blamming on the roof of the car. Them Meades inside, scared and laughing both. I ain’t so struck on them Meades.”

  “Mama’s not either. I heard her say so. Twice. ‘I just can’t stand them another year.’ That’s what she said.”

  “They keep on coming,” said Semmes. “It’s got to be regular.”

  “What you going to have?”

  “Crawfish bisque, stuffed hen, pickled peaches, biscuits, cauliflower, beets, tomatoes, rice and beans on the side, strawberry chill with macaroons. Chicory.”

  “Same as ever,” said Mary Dee.

  “Between here and Florida, ain’t no cook good as me,” said Semmes.

  “And we got you,” said Mary Dee, complacently, repeating what she’d heard.

  “Got to take me home, though,” Semmes gloated. “Got to go get me. Even if I move a hundred miles. I ain’t walking nowhere. Not before I die.”

  “When you die? Where you think you can walk to when you die?”

  “Lord knows,” said Semmes. “He tell me, chile.”

  “I’m eight years old,” said Mary Dee, not knowing exactly what she meant, and ran into the house.