by Sally Mann
Still, I had enough gray matter in the brainpan and was a diligent and hard worker once I got fired up. As I went through school I discovered I was also competitive, on the honor roll all the way until high school:
(Note my father’s whimsically varied signatures. I lined up eight years of report cards, all signed by him, and all signed in a different way. He was a busy man, a practicing medical doctor: how did he manage to keep this silly conceit going?)
In those years and the horse years that followed (the pre–driver’s license years), I had as halcyon a life as any rural girl, despite the obstacles my horse-insensitive parents placed in my way. My natural, unquenchable rebellious streak played out on horseback, and, as I am still engaging in irresponsible, high-speed horse behavior, who am I, now in my sixties, to condemn that high-flying wild child?
Not so easily forgiven is the girl who dismounted for the last time from her exhausted horse and, learner’s permit in pocket, peeled out of the driveway, double clutching and burning rubber. This is a chapter we’ll cut short: the bleached hair and blue eye shadow, tight pants with what little tatas I had pushing up out of my tank top above them, the many boyfriends, the precocious sexual behavior, the high school intrigues, the vulgar, sassy mouth, the very deliberate anti-intellectualism and provocation.
My poor parents. What else could they do but adopt the posture of benign obliviousness that had served them so well in the past? They gave me rules, of course, but at every turn they must have despaired of ever enforcing them. The law, or at least the superintendent of schools, Mr. Tardy, stepped in at one point to whack me for my irresponsible driving, and my father embraced his efforts with what I thought of at the time as unseemly prosecutorial zeal.
I remember this event as if it were yesterday—hell, better than I remember yesterday. We lived at the top of a big hill on Ross Road, and I had been allowed the car to run afternoon errands (who knows what trouble I was really getting into). On the way home, when I got to the hill, I found myself lugging along behind the exhaust-spewing school bus. I knew that bus well, Rockbridge County #54, and knew it was mostly filled with country children often smelling of urine, their teeth rotten, one of them subject to epileptic fits in the aisle of the bus, painfully arcing and frothing until she subsided into a pool of pee, while the bus driver indifferently flicked his eyes up to the mirror and the rest of us exchanged helpless, anxious glances. I had ridden that bus for years and wanted to send it and its occupants the message that I was on my own now, in my own car. When the hill leveled off and the bus began to brake at our neighbor’s house, I downshifted hard into second gear and gunned the car past the bus, not even glancing to see if the folding doors on the far side had been opened to let the three Feddeman children out.
Turns your blood to ice, doesn’t it? It certainly did my father’s, who wrote back to Mr. Tardy, as he says, within minutes. And that was a Tuesday, a full office day with a waiting room overflowing with patients; he was plenty pissed. I’m sure he punished the hell out of me, but I don’t remember it in the way I remember being the asshole who pushed that accelerator.
On the weekends I would head off with my date in his Chevelle or El Camino, my hair rat’s-nested and lacquered into ringlets atop my heavily made-up face, eyelashes curled and matted with mascara, heavy black lines drawn across and well past my eyelid in a Cher-like Cleopatra imitation, lips shiny with cheap lipstick, Jungle Gardenia flowering at my throat, on my wrists, and between my A-cup breasts, which did their best to swell out of a padded bra.
I would generally heave in pretty close to my absolute curfew so as not to enrage my punctilious father unduly and find my parents serenely sitting on the couch in the living room. My mother, with her stockinged legs tucked beneath her, would be wreathed in blue cigarette smoke, deep in the New York Times or Harper’s. My father, a well-sharpened yellow pencil in hand, would be reading with pointy intensity some scholarly paper or plant catalog from the Far East and wouldn’t deign to raise his eyes. Stripping off her reading glasses, my mother would squint through the smoke at me with vague confusion, as though an unexpected stranger had just appeared.
Weaving slightly, I would stand not in front of them but off to the side, as if eager to head down the hall to my bedroom to get some last-minute studying done. My hair, trailing bobby pins, would be matted and tendriled against my hickey-spotted neck, and the skirt of my dress would be wrinkled, the taupe toes of pantyhose peeking out from my purse. My swollen lips were now a natural, chapped red, and my cheeks blushed with beard burn. Peering over the angry marks on either side of her nose left by her glasses, my mother, studying the stone fireplace four feet behind me, would ask casually: “Oh, did you have a nice time, dear?”
Really, what choice did they have but to send me away to school? My brothers, nine and seven years older than me, were hectoring them to send me to Putney, which they’d both attended and loved. Even I knew, on some level, that I needed to get out of the high school world whose horizon stopped at cheerleader tryouts and drag races on the bypass.
Ray Goodlatte, the admissions director at Putney, must have waived a few of their policies to get me in. In a pattern that has remained constant all my life, my verbal scores were in the ninety-ninth percentile but, oh god, were my math scores abysmal; and my high school grades were only so-so, not always on the honor roll anymore. Most of the kids at Putney were sophisticated children of urban intellectuals with good scores and good grades, fewer than 20 percent from below the Mason-Dixon Line.
Not one would have known, as I did, what a whomping a four-on-the-floor GTO could give a Barracuda in the quarter-mile on the bypass.
So in September of 1967 my mother packed me and my brass-cornered trunk, the same one that my brother Bob had lugged from station to station in New York, into her powder-blue Rambler station wagon and we set off for Vermont.
Halfway there, the car blew a head gasket and died, so we rented a much newer car. In it, as we pulled up to White Cottage, my new dorm, I unknowingly enjoyed the last moment of personal confidence that I was to feel for a long time.
The first week, I raised my hand in Hepper Caldwell’s history class and asked what a Jew was. Hepper (we were allowed to call our teachers by their first names), though startled, refrained from making fun of me, but no such luck from the rest of the class, many of whom were Jews. I was the most ridiculed minority of all: a dumb cracker, with a trunk full of very uncool reversible wrap-around skirts my mother had sewn herself, Clarks desert boots with crepe soles from Talbots, and variably sized pink foam hair rollers. Nobody at Putney had hydrogen peroxide blond hair teased into a beehive, nobody at Putney wore makeup, and nobody at Putney listened to the Righteous Brothers or wore her boyfriend’s letter sweater and heavy class ring, its band wrapped with dirty adhesive tape.
In fact, hardly anybody at Putney even had boyfriends and girlfriends. I was suddenly living in another country where my currency was worthless, where all my hard-earned stock was downgraded. I tried to interest a few of the more likely boyfriend prospects in my wheelbarrow loads of devalued charm and sexual allure, but was met with perplexity and occasionally humiliating disdain.
Confused, but not defeated, I began to mint a new currency based on qualities valued at Putney: creativity, intellect, artistic ability, scholarship, political awareness, and, most important, cool emotional reserve.
Through it all, trying to sort out a whole new life, I ached for home. I missed the embrace of the gentle, ancient Blue Ridge and the easy sufferance of the gracious Shenandoah Valley. I missed Virginia, where sentimentality was not a character flaw, where the elegiac, mournful mood of the magnolia twilight quickened my poetry with a passion that, even read in the hot light of the next day, was forgiven, where the kindness of strangers was expected and not just a literary trope, where memory and romance were the coin of the realm. There I was, desolate with longing, in rawboned, doubt-inducing, unpoetic, chapped-cheeked, passionless Vermont.
The lette
rs I wrote to my parents from that time, cringe-inducing and excruciating to reread, show a clear progression. First come uncertainty and loneliness, but in bouncy teenybopper talk, punctuated with what we now call emoticons, hearts and flowers drawn in the margins. But as months go by, the tenor of those letters changes, and they begin to explore existential questions about the nature of man, the nature of revolution, much discussed at Putney, and the “Negro problem,” as the white problem was termed at the time.
By the time I went home for Christmas break, I had largely sorted myself out. The official reports from my teachers and counselors were all good…
and my brothers and parents were relieved.
I had set the course for what proved to be the rest of my life.
Writing came first. I was frequently the poet on duty when the Muse of Verse, likely distracted by other errands, released some of her weaker lines, but that didn’t stop my passion for it. Beginning in that first year at Putney, I could be found, way after lights-out, crouched in the closet earnestly composing long, verbally dense poetic meditations, almost always in some way relating to the South.
These are the last lands: My blood and heritage.
The seasons, the sky and the soil are within me…
I have asked of the sky
And it gives me the reply of the cyclic ages—
Blistering sun and the cool blink of nightfall…
It offers its knowledge on the flat palm of morning,
For what has not been drawn into its black fist at nighttime?
I return to these lands for the last time.
Languid days of mottled light and sycamore
and nights of thick, sweet violet.
With this sky, this soil, these seasons,
with the Southlands I was born
and with them I grew, and now
I return to them
and to the past which composes them.
I am called by the frail and intangible thread of…
… and so on. You get the drift.
Early on I tried my hand at the traditional arts—painting, woodcuts, pottery, and etchings.
But in none of them was there a glimmer of talent.
Bill Hunt, my Putney art teacher, had this to say about my artistic practices:
So, so true, Bill.
And then came photography.
Here is a paragraph from the sprawling, excited letter I wrote to my parents from Putney in April 1969 after I developed my first roll of film, which had been shot on spring break in Rockbridge County with an old Leica III my father had given me.
I have just returned triumphant from the darkroom. The best photographer in the school helped me develop my film and both he and I were absolutely ecstatic with the results. A lot of the pictures were of patterns of boards, textures of peeling paint on walls and some vines and old farm machinery. But their composition and depth and focus were all really good. I am absolutely frantic with… happiness and pride.… It’s all rather unbelievable and perhaps a total fluke, but really very exciting anyway. God!!
This is the contact sheet of the exposures that survived from that first roll.
Maybe I was high that night, or maybe my expectations were low, but either way, from this vantage point, it’s hard to see what all the commotion was about. All the same, I shouldn’t make fun here of the loopily excited girl who wrote that letter after developing her first roll of film.
Because I am still that girl when it comes to developing film. There is nothing better than the thrill of holding a great negative, wet with fixer, up to the light. And, here’s the important thing: it doesn’t even have to be a great negative. You get the same thrill with any negative; with art, as someone once said, most of what you have to do is show up. The hardest part is setting the camera on the tripod, or making the decision to bring the camera out of the car, or just raising the camera to your face, believing, by those actions, that whatever you find before you, whatever you find there, is going to be good.
And, when you get whatever you get, even if it’s a fluky product of that slipping-glimpser vision that de Kooning celebrated, you have made something. Maybe you’ve made something mediocre—there’s plenty of that in any artist’s cabinets—but something mediocre is better than nothing, and often the near-misses, as I call them, are the beckoning hands that bring you to perfection just around the blind corner.
So, there I was, age seventeen, holding my dripping negatives to the lightbulb, and voicing to my parents in exuberant prose my roiled-up feelings. Maybe I didn’t know it at the time, but I had found the twin artistic passions that were to consume my life. And, in characteristic fashion, I threw myself into them with a fervor that, from this remove, seems almost comical. I existed in a welter of creativity—sleepless, anxious, self-doubting, pressing for both perfection and impiety, like some ungodly cross between a hummingbird and a bulldozer.
Not so different, really, from the way I am now.
My writing instructor, Ray Goodlatte (the same admissions officer who allowed me to squeak into Putney in the first place), prophesied greatness for me in a nearly illegible Putney report:
You are launched on a lifetime writer’s project. I feel privileged to have seen your work in progress. Your splendid critical intelligence qualifies you, as maker, to receive a high order of gift.… You are a person by whom language will live. I shall look forward to reading you.
It would seem that having discovered my True Calling(s), writing and photography, and enjoying some academic success, I might tone down the cussedness and rebellious behavior that had defined my life thus far.
But no, not really.
I smoked, I drank, I skipped classes, I snuck out, I took drugs, I stole quarts of ice cream for my dorm by breaking into the kitchen storerooms, I made out with my boyfriends in the library basement, I hitchhiked into town and down I-91, and when caught, I weaseled out of all of it.
My attitude sucked about the farmwork required at the school.
There is no need to switch on the fog machine of ambiguity around these facts: I was still a problem child.
I got in big, real-world trouble a few times, the kind of trouble that I was barely able to flirt my way out of. Once, while visiting my boyfriend at Columbia, I shoplifted a blouse in Macy’s. I did it in the crudest kind of way, just as I had tucked those quarts of ice cream under my winter cape. Of course, I was immediately apprehended and taken down to the basement, where my dramatic memory has me passing a series of Hollywood-worthy interrogation rooms, painted a celadon color just a bit too far on the olive side, whose lone wooden tables were illuminated by a single bulb dangling from the ceiling. Past those I was apparently led, trembling, to a small, cluttered office. The head of security, an ex–New York cop, stared at me with lowered lids, a cigarette burning in the ashtray.
He’d clearly seen my type before and he let me know, with a snort of derision, what he thought of us. Eyes averted, in a soft southern voice with a goodly amount of throb in it, I tried the “But I’m just a poor Appalachian girl…” routine and he interrupted me by finishing my sentence: “… who just happens to go to one of the most expensive private boarding schools on the East Coast.” I fell to pieces like a dollar watch; I was fucked. I wasn’t scared in the least of this ex-cop, or of the New York legal system. No, I was terrified that this talking piece of dry ice was going to pick up the phone and call my no-gray-ever, all black or white, absolutely moral, never-an-inch-of-wiggle-room-for-equivocations-or-excuses, King of Perfect Rectitude and Repercussions, father.
The ex-cop knew that, of course, and played with me for a while, a well-fed and uninterested cat with a mouse. Then, with a surprisingly avuncular, weary little smile, he stood up, stubbed out his cigarette, and walked me back to the main entrance, keeping his eye on me as I went through the revolving door and out onto the street.
The next time I got into bad trouble, of the full-tilt terror with teeth variety, was when I was given a credit card number s
aid to be that of Dow Chemical, on which to charge my long-distance phone calls to my boyfriend in New York. Of course all of us antiwar radicals hated Dow, so, the way I saw it, it was fine to be charging my calls to their number. After all, Dow Chemical was burning babies alive with flaming jelly. How bad were a few little phone calls within the scope of that evil?
And besides, they were never going to catch me.
Of course, it’s only now, finding this letter stuffed into the pages of my journal, that I note the irony in the name of the telephone operator.
So, my parents, with ostentatious righteousness, paid up and punished the snot out of me, again. For two weeks when I got home after graduation they worked me like a rented mule, making me haul thorny brush and all uphill, too.
I even got in trouble at Putney with photography, and right about the same time as that phone call, a week or so before graduation. Having loaded my second-ever roll of film into the Leica on a beautiful sunny afternoon, I headed off with my friends Kit and (let’s call him) Calvin to a stand of pines adjoining the school. There they stripped down and let me photograph them in a series of completely harmless nude poses. I shot only twenty-four images, eight of which were of Kit lying alone in the grove, my attempt to imitate one of my favorite images, that of an incandescent bare-naked child in a forest clearing by Wynn Bullock in The Family of Man. Afterward they dressed and we settled down to the real business of rolling cigarettes and drinking gaggingly sweet sherry out of a clay jar I had made in pottery class.
With the same dumb naïveté to which I am unfortunately still susceptible, I never considered the images anything other than a sweet meditation on the figure. And, indeed, that is all they were. Both Kit and Calvin were strikingly beautiful; sunlight dappled the pine-needled forest floor, and I was keen to expand upon the successes of my first roll of film. Nothing in the pictures suggests that anything of a sexual nature had taken place.