The Queen of Palmyra

by Minrose Gwin

  I lived the white side of this history and observed the black side. My babysitter, Eva Lee Miller, to whom the book is dedicated, was African American, and I’d be dropped off at her house on the black side of town and spend hours there “helping” her sew and cook and clean, though I doubt I was of much help. Like Zenie Johnson, she was a witty, brilliant woman who fended off the burial insurance man with queenly aplomb. She had a wicked sense of humor where white people were concerned, and she let me know from the get-go that she didn’t trust any of us. She and her husband, Hiram Miller, worked several different jobs to make ends meet. I visited her in her home until she died, and we wrote letters back and forth when I went off to college. Over the years, I became deeply attached to her and admired her enormously. She worked hard and she never gave up; she was a model for me. In my own family, my mother was rather progressive for the times, though not openly so, and my stepfather treated African Americans respectfully. But from an early age, I had the feeling that something was very wrong. I think of my generation of Southerners as the bridge between the Jim Crow days of this novel and the present, when things are far from perfect, but greatly improved. Would Medgar Evers or Eva or anyone fighting for the right to vote in the early sixties have expected the election of a black president by 2008? Even Myrlie Evers-Williams, Medgar Evers’s widow, has said she didn’t think it would happen this soon.

  Uncle Wiggily, Br’er Rabbit, Nancy Drew, Bomba the Swamp Boy—this book is so much about stories.

  Yes, how they mold us, how we depend so desperately on them, how they can make us whole or tear us into a million pieces. We tell ourselves stories that make our lives bearable. These stories shape us and show us how to make sharp turns and put one foot in front of the other—they can trip us up or take us by the hand and lead us home. The stories Florence hears and reads help her empathize with others. Because of that empathy, she casts aside the Bomba story, though it sinks into her unconscious in an insidious way. For her own survival, she must take to heart Uncle Wiggily’s optimism and Nancy Drew’s intrepidness. She must be tricky and scheming like Br’er Rabbit in order not to get stuck in the briar patch.

  Like Eva and Flo, you’re a teacher. Do you see teaching as a major element of The Queen of Palmyra?

  Teachers can change lives and open spaces in the world where there were none, in large ways and small. Eva does this for Florence; she arms her with “the sentence” so that she can make it through the fifth grade and move on with her life. Eva teaches Ray and other African Americans how to pry open the white-controlled world by using language as a lever. In her turn, Florence teaches semicolons and diagramming to her inner-city students in New Orleans to help them map out an incoherent world. That’s why Florence takes that sharp left turn back into her story—it’s the act of teaching that calls her back, it’s Eva who calls her back.

  What does The Queen of Palmyra say about the scales of justice?

  That they’re very wobbly at best and heavily weighted toward the powerful. Several white women, men, and children who witnessed horrendous crimes during the Civil Rights years have come forward in the past couple of decades to testify about these crimes. In most cases, these belated witnesses felt enormously threatened during the sixties when these acts of violence were committed and so just recently have felt they could speak. Some of them had actually forgotten the events and then remembered them in adulthood. Many of the perpetrators of these crimes were old and sometimes on the brink of death when their cases were reopened, so the question of justice, of how one can close one’s eyes when fear is involved, of how people turn away from the most terrible things and the dire necessity that prods them to do so—all of these tragic stories drove me to create Florence Forrest. One thing Florence has to face in her adulthood is that her silence, her blindness, has precluded any chance at justice for Eva’s murder. This seems to have been an unconscious choice—we’re never quite sure—but it’s a choice and, as the years pass, it can’t be undone.

  What would have happened if Florence had spoken up that summer?

  If you look at the historical evidence, Win Forrest probably would have been acquitted. Southern juries back then were all white and all male; white murderers of African Americans got a free ride. Examples from that period abound. The murderers of Emmett Till went free. The trial of Byron De La Beckwith, who killed NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers, twice resulted in a hung jury; finally, in 1994, Beckwith was convicted, but by then he was an old man and had lived out most of his natural life. The two hung juries in the Beckwith case were considered a victory by the prosecution back in the sixties.

  Did you have to do extensive research for the novel?

  My research into the Civil Rights Movement in central Mississippi in the early sixties has been pretty thorough because I’m also working on a book about Evers. His death took place in Jackson, Mississippi, the summer of 1963, the summer of the novel. His murder and what it meant to black Mississippians figure in Florence’s and Eva’s side-by-side stories.

  You’re a scholar of Southern literature as well as a writer. What makes Southern literature Southern?

  The rich variety of writing over the last couple of decades makes that a hard question to answer, but there’s a sense of location that’s peculiar to Southern literature—it can manifest in a character’s voice, maybe a particular inflection, a resonance; in a groundedness in place or a sense of loss of home; in a painful awareness of what’s been called “the burden of Southern history,” the long shadow of slavery and Jim Crow and their present-day ramifications. Location, Eudora Welty says, is both “the crossroads of circumstance” and “the heart’s field.” Southern literature pivots around both, in ways that are mysteriously both specific and universal.

  So, do you see yourself as a Southern writer consumed with your own cultural past?

  I’m interested in the idea of being consumed by the past, how the ghosts of the past continue to haunt us despite our best efforts to erase them on the blackboards of our minds. For me as a writer, the Southern past is a teacher. It helps me understand the human willingness to avert the eyes from what we don’t want to see, or deafen the ears to stories we don’t want to hear. It’s a human failing—this ability to blind ourselves to the terrible things that don’t directly affect us. This is how the Holocaust happened—and it’s something I think we need to question constantly in ourselves. Eva will always haunt Florence. Florence will always walk that levee and think about her.

  Read on

  Praise for

  Wishing for Snow

  “Wishing for Snow sits on the short shelf of books that I will never part with. Minrose Gwin writes with a poet’s lyricism, a historian’s scrupulousness, a maverick’s ingenuity, and a daughter’s immense love. A wholly original and transcendent memoir.”

  —Sandra Scofield,

  author of Occasions of Sin: A Memoir

  “Astonishingly honest, tender, and brave, Minrose Gwin’s luminous memoir of her mother’s troubled life should be required reading for anyone struggling to forgive a difficult parent. Wishing for Snow is a marvel of empathy and insight. With lyrical intelligence and clarity, Gwin distinguishes her mother as a vulnerable, sensitive, and gifted human being apart from a daughter’s crushed expectations.”

  —Marianne Gingher,

  author of Adventures in Pen Land:

  One Writer’s Journey from Inklings to Ink

  “The mother-daughter tie is perhaps the most intimate any of us will ever experience. Stories of rage and laughter, the songs of survival and destruction are passed through the birth cord and from the mother’s milk. Wishing for Snow is a testament to a difficult and disturbing relationship between a mother and daughter, both poets attempting to sing in a difficult age. This gift of a book made me question: how do any of us become poets? Here is one very particular and moving answer.”

  —Joy Harjo, author of

  How We Became Human: Collected Poems

  “An eloquent me
moir of a daughter seeking a clear view of her complicated, crazy mother and coming to grips with her…. Gwin’s mother is very much alive in this lyrical book. She haunts the pages with her own words, shakes webs from Gwin’s closeted memory, and stirs up the dust of a life lived intensely, madly, and often painfully…. This is definitely a real-life story we all need to hear.”

  —Booklist

  “Wishing for Snow addresses the complicated nuances of love without ever descending to sugarcoated sentimentalism—and without allowing anyone (herself included) to be free from guilt, implication, or accountability. Gwin’s memoir brings her…into conversation with authors from Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor to Doris Betts, Gail Godwin, Janisse Ray, and Dorothy Allison. Her book is one that demands to be read.”

  —Southern Scribe

  “Gwin describes [anger] with honesty, conveying the complexity of simultaneously loving and being furious at the mother whose mental illness presented her with so many seemingly insoluble dilemmas…. The mother is marvelously present throughout the book.”

  —Women’s Review of Books

  “Gwin’s effort to reconcile her own identity with her mother’s life and death is tender and haunting—a compelling and satisfying read.”

  —Gulf Coast

  “At turns, Gwin’s memoir is sad, hilarious, frightening, rambling, and positively operatic…suffused with both Gwin’s wish to understand her mother and the knowledge that fulfilling such a wish is likely as impossible as snow that sticks in Mississippi at Christmas.”

  —Mississippi Magazine

  Excerpt from Wishing for Snow

  THERE IS SUCH A THING as crazy-mother bonding. This can occur unexpectedly any time two women who have crazy mothers are having a conversation. It happens when one realizes the other also has had a crazy mother, and it is both painful and pleasurable. There are more crazy mothers than you might think. You can be having a professional lunch at a conference or with colleagues in another department and one of you will mention, perhaps without even intending to, that she has a crazy mother. Oh, she will say to you or you will say to her, your mother was, uh, mentally ill? Yes, she was crazy, you will say. Really crazy? she will ask. (Many people will claim that their mothers are crazy when they do not know what they are talking about.) Yes, you will say, really crazy. Attempted suicide, anorexia, paranoia, violent, the whole bit. I had to commit her twice. A flash of recognition across the table, a sigh. So was mine. Yes, mine was too.

  What follows is a conversation that no one else can possibly follow. It is made up of codes, silences, sighs, pauses. The first question: Is she dead (yet); code, are you still going through this? The second question: What about the rest of the family? Gone you say. My brother and I have not seen each other since the funeral. My sister calls when it snows at home; she is unaccountably excited by snow. Ah yes, my friend will say. Yes, I know (silence). What about you, she says, how are you; code, do you sometimes feel crazy too, are you scared like me of becoming your mother? I’m okay now, you say. I kind of lost it—went over the edge and couldn’t stop crying—after I committed her the second time. Therapy, anti-anxiety drugs, anti-depressants, anti-everything. None of it helped. It’s only time that helps, don’t you think. Now I’m okay. Yes, I’m okay now I think. Oh yes, she says, me too but I’m still on the Prozac. Hope to get off soon. Sometimes it seems impossible to think about it all. Sometimes it is too much to believe.

  Sometimes, though, such conversations give me pause. They make me think my mother wasn’t so bad. She was just always wishing for snow and usually it didn’t come. And when it came, it didn’t stick.

  One friend was adopted. In my opinion, she had a perfectly good mother and father. Why trouble the waters? They were crusaders for civil rights during the fifties and sixties. Their lives were threatened and crosses were burned on their property. They were parents to be proud of. I wished they were mine. When my friend got older, she wanted to find her birth mother. Her adopted parents, being the good people they were, gave her the information she needed and she found her mother and her sister. Both were schizophrenic. Now I know why I’ve felt so crazy all my life, she says; it’s kind of a relief.

  A colleague tells me that, when she was four, her mother, who was an alcoholic, almost killed her two-year-old sister by starving her to death. My friend remembers the doctor storming into the apartment and yelling at her mother: “You’ve got to feed this baby or I’m going to take her away. You’ve got to feed this baby!”

  Another friend believes that she was tortured by her father and some other people in secret ceremonies associated with their church in a small western town. When she was little she would be awakened in the middle of the night and taken from her bed to a room with bright lights. Her mother, she remembers, was always watching. Now my friend is afraid of electrical wiring. She remembers something about fur and feathers.

  On the Death of a Bluejay

  He was a jaunty fellow,

  a bright and talky fellow.

  He did me no harm.

  A few berries here and there,

  acorns snitched from squirrels

  (who sometimes shared his fate)

  and nuts stashed away in the eaves.

  For the love of pecans

  he was shot down in midflight

  and lies festering beneath the tree.

  I think of Icarus

  gutstrung between earth and heaven

  like a speck of red dust itching the eyeball

  of the universe.

  Gold-singer, dream-squawker

  with a yen for nuts and bolts.

  Tinkerer, tailor, candlestick-maker

  with hot wax shrouding his wings.

  Sun-streaker, moon-tamer

  prancing on a pinhead,

  breaching the walls of heaven.

  Erin Clayton Pitner

  Dear Erin the poet, Dear Mama, I tell you if I had had to choose a crazy mother it would have been you.

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  Acknowledgments

  I will be forever grateful to Jill McCorkle for her extraordinary generosity along the way, and especially for helping make this a wiser book. Heartfelt thanks go to Leigh Feldman for her boundless enthusiasm, wit, and sagacity, and Carrie Feron for her astute, respectful editing and bedrock belief in Florence’s story. I appreciate Tessa Woodward’s ability to make the production process seem effortless.

  I am very much indebted to Grace Bauer, Susan Dever, Julie Mars, Margaret Randall, and Sharon Warner for reading the Whole Thing and offering a wealth of insight. Micaela Seidel and John Randall offered early support. Ellis Anderson provided a room, a desk, and a magnificent live oak. Mary Alice Kirkpatrick did detective work. Bill Andrews told about encyclopedia sales.

  I thank family members for loving support: Carol and Shaun Leverton, Lynn Holland Brasfield, Shannon Grannon, Linda Jane Barnette, and Nicolle Salvaggio. For sage counsel and support, I’m grateful to Marianne Gingher, Lawrence Naumoff, Beverly Taylor, and Linda Wagner-Martin. And thanks to the cheering section: Barbara Bennett and Fred Hobson, Angela Boone and Mary Bess Whidden, Karen Booth and Elyse Crystall, Barbara Ewell and Jerry Speir, Rebecka and Ed Fisher, Harolyn Cumlet and Patrice Waldrop, Rebecca Mark, Donnie McMahand, and Kevin Murphy, Sylvia Rodriguez, Judith Sensibar, and Marta Weigle.

  I’m grateful for the opportunity to have read from early versions at Purdue University and the Taos Summer Writers’ Conference. For their perceptive commentary, I thank members of the Global South group at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And I appreciate funding from UNC and the Kenan research fund for travel related to the book.

  My greatest debt is to Ruth Salvaggio, who offered a skeptical eye and an open heart—the best of all combinations in a reader.

  Millwood, Mississippi, and the characters of this book are fictitious. I have made every effort to be accurate about actu
al places and historical events. Sources that have been helpful and, in some cases essential, include the following:

  Chafe, William H. et al, ed. Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the South. New York: The New Press, 2001.

  Cobbs, Elizabeth H./Petric Smith. Long Time Coming: An Insider’s Story of the Birmingham Church Bombing That Rocked the World. Birmingham: Crane, 1994.

  Dennis, Jana. Palmyra Street. New Orleans: Neighborhood Story Project, 2005.

  Dittmer, John. Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.

  Ezekiel, Raphael S. The Racist Mind: Portraits of American Neo-Nazis and Klansmen. New York: Penguin, 1995.

  Garis, Howard. Uncle Wiggily’s Travels. New York: Platt & Munk, 1939.

  Gates, Henry Louis. Colored People: A Memoir. New York: Vintage, 1995.

  Harris, Trudier. Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South. Boston: Beacon, 2003.

  Hendrickson, Paul. Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy. New York: Vintage, 2004.

  Hudson, Winson and Constance Curry. Mississippi Harmony: Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

  The Clarion-Ledger; Jackson Daily News, June–August, 1963.

  Kennedy, Stetson. Jim Crow Guide: The Way It Was. Boca Raton: Florida Atlantic Univ. Press, 1990.