by Joan Didion
In the 1980s, when the condition of the Kilgore Cemetery had become a matter of local concern (vandals had dug up a body and stolen its head), the president of the Rancho Cordova Chamber of Commerce appealed to “Cordovans” (residents of Rancho Cordova, in other words “new people”) to join a volunteer effort to clean up the beer bottles and debris left by trespassers. “There are a lot of residents who would like to see this historic site preserved as it deserves to be,” he was quoted as having said in the newspaper story my mother clipped and sent to me in Los Angeles.
I asked, when my mother and I next spoke, if the family—the seventy-some of my father’s cousins who annually attended the Kilgore Family Reunion in McKinley Park in East Sacramento, say—was joining the effort to clean up the Kilgore Cemetery.
The family, my mother said, did not own the Kilgore Cemetery.
It occurred to me that neither did the president of the Rancho Cordova Chamber of Commerce own the Kilgore Cemetery, but I opted to go in a different direction. I asked how exactly it had come to pass that the family did not own the Kilgore Cemetery.
“I presume somebody sold it,” my mother said.
I thought about this.
I also thought about having seen the rattlesnake slide from the broken stone into the grass.
I had seen the rattlesnake but I had failed to get out of the car and kill it, thereby violating, in full awareness that I was so doing, what my grandfather had told me was “the code of the West.”
If “not killing the rattlesnake” violated “the code of the West,” how about “selling the cemetery”? Would that qualify? Not surprisingly, the Kilgore Cemetery makes an appearance of a kind in Run River. Lily’s father, Walter Knight, after he misses a curve on the river road and drowns trapped in his car, is buried in what is described as a small family cemetery where the last previous burial had taken place in 1892. The burial is described from Lily’s point of view: “There was a certain comfort in the unkempt graveyard. Dried grass obscured the markers, and the wings had been broken years before from the stone angels guarding the rusted wire gate; there was about the place none of the respect for death implicit in a well-tended plot.”
Could this have been what I thought letting the Kilgore Cemetery go to ruin demonstrated? Some admirable wagons-west refusal to grant death its dominion? The idealization of the small family cemetery in Run River continues: “Once, a long time before, Walter Knight had brought Lily to see this graveyard. He had made her trace out with her finger the letters on the stones, the names and their dates, until she found the small, rough stone which marked the oldest grave.” This “oldest grave” was that of a child not yet two, the first family member to die in California. “I think nobody owns land until their dead are in it,” Walter Knight had said to Lily on this occasion. “Sometimes I think this whole valley belongs to me,” Lily had said, and her father had responded sharply: “It does, you hear me? We made it.”
Had I known when I was writing Run River that the Kilgore Cemetery had been or would be sold, was this the rationalization I would have worked out? Our dead were in it, so we owned it? Our deal, so we could sell it? Or would I have somehow managed to incorporate “selling the cemetery” into my bill of particulars against the “new people,” against the “changes”? At what point exactly might I have asked: was it new people who sold the cemetery? Was it new people who ploughed under and grazed out the grass that could be tied over the saddle? How would Josiah Royce have construed “selling the cemetery”? “Novel degree of carelessness”? “Previously unknown blindness to social duties”? Or “building a well-organized, permanent, and progressive State on the Pacific Coast”? Or was that the same thing?
From the 1870s to the 1920s, according to Richard W. Fox’s 1978 study So Far Disordered in Mind: Insanity in California 1870—1930, California had a higher rate of commitment for insanity than any other state in the nation, a disproportion most reasonably explained, Fox suggests, “by the zeal with which California state officials sought to locate, detain, and treat not only those considered ‘mentally ill,’ but also a wide variety of other deviants—including, as state hospital physicians put it, ‘imbeciles, dotards, idiots, drunkards, simpletons, fools,’ and ‘the aged, the vagabond, the helpless.’” Not only did California have this notably higher rate of commitment but the institutions to which it committed its citizens differed fundamentally from those in the East, where the idea of how to deal with insanity had been from the beginning medicalized, based on regimes—however more honored in the breach—of treatment and therapy. The idea of how to deal with insanity in California began and ended with detention.
So broad were the standards for committal, and so general was the inclination to let the state take care of what might in another culture have been construed as a family burden, that even many of the doctors who ran the system were uneasy. As early as 1862, according to So Far Disordered in Mind, the resident physician at the Stockton State Asylum for the Insane complained of receiving patients “who, if affected in their minds at all, it is the weakness of old age, or intemperance, or perhaps most commonly both together.” In 1870, the federal census classified one in every 489 Californians as insane. By 1880, the rate had risen to one in 345. After 1903, when the rate had reached one in 260 and the asylums had passed capacity, the notion of sterilizing inmates gained currency, the idea being that a certain number could then be released without danger of reproducing. Sterilization, or “asexualization,” of inmates, which was legalized in some other states as early as 1907, was made legal in California in 1909. By 1917, the right of the state to sterilize had been extended twice, first to cases in which the patient did not agree to the procedure, then to cases in which the patient had not even been necessarily diagnosed with a hereditary or incurable disorder, but only with “perversion or marked departures from normal mentality.” By the end of 1920, of the 3,233 sterilizations for insanity or feeblemindedness performed to that date throughout the United States, 2,558, or seventy-nine percent, had taken place in California.
What was arresting in this pattern of commitment was the extent to which it diverged from the California sense of itself as loose, less socially rigid than the rest of the country, more adaptable, more tolerant of difference. When Fox analyzed the San Francisco commitment records for the years 1906 to 1929, he found that the majority of those hospitalized, fifty-nine percent, had been committed not because they were violent, not because they presented a threat to others or to themselves, but simply because they had been reported, sometimes by a police officer but often by a neighbor or relative, to exhibit “odd or peculiar behavior.” In 1914, for example, San Francisco medical examiners granted the wish of a woman to commit her thirty-seven-year-old unmarried sister, on the grounds that the sister, despite her “quiet and friendly” appearance during detention, had begun “to act silly, lost interest in all things which interest women, could no longer crochet correctly as formerly, takes no interest in anything at present.” In 1915, a forty-year-old clerk was committed because “for three weeks he has been annoying the City Registrar, calling every day and insisting that he is a Deputy.” In 1922, a twenty-three-year-old divorcée was committed after a neighbor reported that she was “lazy, slovenly, careless of personal appearance, stays away from home for days, neglecting self and consorting with men.” The same year, a forty-eight-year-old pianist was committed on the grounds that “she has been irresponsible for years; has been a source of great annoyance to many institutions such as Y.W.C.A. Association, churches, etc.”
The apparently pressing need to commit so many and in many cases such marginally troubled Californians to indefinite custodial detention seems not at the time to have struck their fellow citizens as an excessive lust for social control. Nor did these fellow citizens appear to see their readiness to slough off bothersome relatives and neighbors as a possible defect in their own socialization. Madness, it became convenient to believe quite early on, came with the territory, on the order of
earthquakes. The first State Lunatic Asylum in California, that at Stockton, was established in 1853 specifically to treat those believed to have been driven mad by the goldfields. According to an 1873 State Board of Health report, this endemic madness had to do with “the speculative and gambling spirit” of the California settlement. It had to do with “heterogeneous elements,” it had to do with “change of climate, habits, and modes of life,” it had to do with being “isolated, without sympathy, and deprived of all home influences.” California itself, then, according to its own Board of Health, was “well-calculated to break some link in reason’s chain, and throw into confusion even the best balanced properties of mind.”
I have on my desk a copy of the 1895 California Blue Book, or State Roster, family detritus, salvaged from a Good Will box during a move of my mother’s. I assumed at the time I retrieved it that the roster had been my grandfather’s but I see now that the bookplate reads “Property of Chas. F. Johnson, Bakersfield, Calif., No. 230,” in other words the detritus of someone else’s family. The book is illustrated with etchings and photographs, a startling number of which feature what were in 1895 the state’s five asylums for the insane, huge Victorian structures that appear to have risen from the deserts and fields of California’s rural counties in a solitude more punitive than therapeutic. Among the illustrations are the facts, in neat columns: there were at the Napa State Asylum for the Insane thirty-five “Attendants,” each of whom received an annual salary of $540. All were identified by name. There were, listed under the “Attendants” and also identified by name, sixty “Assistant Attendants,” thirteen of whom received $480 a year and the rest $420. There were on the staff at the State Insane Asylum at Agnews, in Santa Clara County, more “Cooks” and “Assistant Cooks” and “Bakers” and “Assistant Bakers” than there appear to have been doctors (the only doctors listed are the “Medical Director,” at $3,500, and two “Assistant Physicians,” at $2,500 and $2,100 respectively), but the staff roster also includes—a note that chills by the dolorous entertainments it suggests—one “Musician, and Assistant Attendant,” budgeted at $60 a year more than the other, presumably unmusical, Assistant Attendants.
These places survived through my childhood and adolescence into my adult life, sources of a fear more potent even than that of drowning in the rivers (drowning meant you had misread the river, drowning made sense, drowning you could negotiate), the fear of being sent away—no, worse—“put away.” There was near Sacramento an asylum where I was periodically taken with my Girl Scout troop to exhibit for the inmates our determined cheerfulness while singing rounds, nine-year-olds with merit badges on our sleeves pressed into service as Musicians and Assistant Attendants. White coral bells upon a slender stalk, we sang in the sunroom, trying not to make eye contact, lilies of the valley line your garden walk. I could not have known at nine that my grandmother’s sister, who arrived lost in melancholia to live with us after her husband died, would herself die in the asylum at Napa, but the possibility that such a fate could strike at random was the air we breathed.
Oh don’t you wish that you could hear them ring, we sang, one by one faltering, only the strongest or most oblivious among us able to keep the round going in the presence of the put away, the now intractably lost, the abandoned, that will happen only when the angels sing. If it was going to be us or them, which of us in that sunroom would not have regressed in Royce’s view to that “novel degree of carelessness,” that “previously unknown blindness to social duties”? Which of us in that sunroom could not have abandoned the orphaned Miss Gilmore and her brother on the Little Sandy? Which of us in that sunroom did not at some level share in the shameful but entrenched conviction that to be weak or bothersome was to warrant abandonment? Which of us in that sunroom would not see the rattlesnake and fail to kill it? Which of us in that sunroom would not sell the cemetery? Were not such abandonments the very heart and soul of the crossing story? Jettison weight? Keep moving? Bury the dead in the trail and run the wagons over it? Never dwell on what got left behind, never look back at all? Remember, Virginia Reed had warned attentive California children, we who had been trained since virtual infancy in the horrors she had survived, never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can. Once on a drive to Lake Tahoe I found myself impelled to instruct my brother’s small children in the dread lesson of the Donner Party, just in case he had thought to spare them. “Don’t worry about it,” another attentive California child, Patricia Hearst, recalled having told herself during the time she was locked in a closet by her kidnappers. “Don’t examine your feelings. Never examine your feelings—they’re no help at all.”
Part Four
1
To me as a child, the State was the world as I knew it, and I pictured other States and countries as pretty much “like this.” I never felt the warm, colorful force of the beauty of California until I had gone away and come back over my father’s route: dull plains; hot, dry desert; the night of icy mountains; the dawning foothills breaking into the full day of sunshine in the valley; and last, the sunset through the Golden Gate. And I came to it by railroad, comfortably, swiftly. My father, who plodded and fought or worried the whole long hard way at oxen pace, always paused when he recalled how they turned over the summit and waded down, joyously, into the amazing golden sea of sunshine—he would pause, see it again as he saw it then, and say, “I saw that this was the place to live.”
—Lincoln Steffens,
The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens
MY MOTHER died on May 15, 2001, in Monterey, two weeks short of her ninety-first birthday. The preceding afternoon I had talked to her on the telephone from New York and she had hung up midsentence, a way of saying goodbye so characteristic of her—especially by way of allowing her callers to economize on what she still called “long distance”—that it did not occur to me until morning, when my brother called, that in this one last instance she had been just too frail to keep the connection.
Maybe not just too frail.
Maybe too aware of what could be the import of this particular goodbye.
Flying to Monterey I had a sharp apprehension of the many times before when I had, like Lincoln Steffens, “come back,” flown west, followed the sun, each time experiencing a lightening of spirit as the land below opened up, the checkerboards of the midwestern plains giving way to the vast empty reach between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada; then home, there, where I was from, me, California. It would be a while before I realized that “me” is what we think when our parents die, even at my age, who will look out for me now, who will remember me as I was, who will know what happens to me now, where will I be from.
In the aftermath of my mother’s death I found myself thinking a good deal about the confusions and contradictions in California life, many of which she had herself embodied. She despised, for example, the federal government and its “giveaways,” but saw no contradiction between this view and her reliance on my father’s military reserve status to make free use of Air Force doctors and pharmacies, or to shop at the commissaries and exchanges of whatever military installation she happened to be near. She thought of the true California spirit as one of unfettered individualism, but carried the idea of individual rights to dizzying and often punitive lengths. She definitely aimed for an appearance of being “stern,” a word she seemed to think synonymous with what was not then called “parenting.” As a child herself in the upper Sacramento Valley she had watched men hung in front of the courthouse. When John Kennedy was assassinated she insisted that Lee Harvey Oswald had “every right” to assassinate him, that Jack Ruby in turn had “every right” to kill Lee Harvey Oswald, and that any breakdown of natural order in the event had been on the part of the Dallas police, who had failed to exercise their own right, which was “to shoot Ruby on the spot.” When I introduced her to my future husband, she advised him immediately that he would find her political beliefs so far to the right that he would think her “the original little old lady in ten
nis shoes.” At Christmas that year he gave her the entire John Birch library, dozens of call-to-action pamphlets, boxed. She was delighted, amused, displaying the pamphlets to everyone who came by the house that season, but to the best of my knowledge she never opened one.
She was passionately opinionated on a number of points that reflected, on examination, no belief she actually held. She thought of herself as an Episcopalian, as her mother had been. She was married at Trinity Episcopal Pro-Cathedral in Sacramento. She had me christened there. She buried her mother there. My brother and I had her own funeral service at Saint John’s Episcopal Chapel in Monterey, a church she had actually attended only two or three times but favored as an idea not only because it was a “California” church (it was built in the 1880s by Charles Crocker and C. P. Huntington on the grounds of the Southern Pacific’s Del Monte Hotel) but also because the litany used was that from the 1928, as opposed to the revised, Book of Common Prayer. Yet she had herself at age twelve refused outright to be confirmed an Episcopalian: she had gone through the instruction and been presented to the bishop, but, when asked for the usual rote affirmation of a fairly key doctrinal point, had declared resoundingly, as if it were a debate, that she found herself “incapable of believing” that Christ was the son of God. By the time of my own confirmation, she had further hardened this position. “The only church I could possibly go to would be Unitarian,” she announced when my grandmother asked why she never went to church with us.
“Eduene,” my grandmother said, a soft keening. “How can you say that.”
“I have to say it, if I want to be honest,” my mother said, the voice of sweet reason. “Since I don’t believe that Christ is the son of God.”
My grandmother brightened, seeing space for resolution. “Then it’s fine,” she said. “Because nobody has to believe all that.”