by Sally Mann
No better with the third, Virginia, whose delivery happened at the you’d-never-believe-it-if-it-was-in-a-novel exact minute of my mother’s departing flight for an Arizona vacation she had booked knowing it was within a week of my due date. The other two kids were at home with the flu, cared for by our dear friends K.B. and Hunter. Still, that’s when you could really use a mother.
But I didn’t have that mother, not then and not ever, really. I created a lot of heavy weather about it over the years, but now I’m not really sure why. I had Gee-Gee, who was the best mother a child could want, and at eighteen I had Larry. And besides, I was probably too obstinate and ungrateful to get any advantage from a mother anyway. Plus, by not being a regular 1950s bridge-playing, stay-at-home mother, she got a lot of important things done, many of which have gotten folded up in the selvage of the opening curtains of the new era in America: she stumped for the progressive Adlai Stevenson, chaired the Lexington Interracial Committee, and founded the local League of Women Voters chapter. But, best of all, with a political interest sharpened by having heard in person two of the twentieth century’s greatest orators at the height of their rhetorical careers (FDR at his first inauguration and Hitler at the 1937 Nuremberg Rally), she took on the infamous Virginia poll tax.
This blatant attempt to disenfranchise black voters levied a then-onerous $1.50 tax to vote in any election—local, state, and national. Along with the so-called literacy test, the poll tax was a shameful holdover from the earliest days of Jim Crow, still thriving in many parts of the South. It stuck in my mother’s northern craw, and she decided to see who else opposed it among the people she encountered each day on her errands. She typed up a simple statement and under it stuck a few sheets of blank paper on a clipboard that she carried with her for twenty-eight days in October 1963. She did not go door-to-door; her stated intention was to demonstrate to Governor Albertis Harrison, the man responsible for the equally odious policy of Virginia’s Massive Resistance, that “there were more people who oppose the poll tax than you believe.”
Taped together, the petition reached twenty feet and had five hundred signatures, and after she sent it to the governor it earned my mother, described as “a Lexington housewife,” a big picture and page-two story in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
(Note the little Twombly sculpture off to the left sandwiched between St. Somebody and the decanter of crème de menthe.)
If one thing defined my mother from the time she sat listening to Uncle Skip read to her at Lake Sunapee, it was her love of books and reading. In the early 1960s she single-handedly raised the funds from skeptical and often hostile local governments to establish a thriving regional library and bookmobile, which replaced the three shelves of ratty loaner books in the corner of McCrum’s drugstore.
For sixteen years she ran the university bookstore at Washington and Lee, bringing in writers as diverse as Truman Capote, Howard Nemerov, Betty Friedan, Tom Wolfe, and James Dickey. The last she was proudly escorting around the bookstore when he paused and tapped the spine of his popular novel Deliverance, announcing, “best work of fiction since Faulkner’s ‘The Bear,’” to which my mother surprised herself by delivering her first and only expletive, to my knowledge: “Bullshit.”
It was through books and her annual return to Lake Sunapee, for which she pined all her life, that my mother staved off the pain of a childhood populated by liars and depressives whose sexual messages were confusing, to say the least. Particularly poignant and symbolic is this tale of her last trip, late in her life, to Lake Sunapee, which she described as her own Golden Pond.
She arrived at sunset and stood looking out from the porch of the cottage that the Gages and the Evanses had shared. The Gage family still owned it, and since there seemed to be no one around she took the time to indulge in a moment of nostalgia and romantic reminiscence as she looked out at the shimmering lake.
Her eyes traveled along the pier that extended into the water, the pier where she had spent so many summers reading and playing during what she said was the only really happy time in her life. At the very end of the pier sat a figure in a lounge chair silhouetted against the late afternoon sky. It was a Gage grandson, now middle-aged, and my mother, overcome with emotion, headed down the stairs and along the pier bathed in the glow of homecoming at sunset.
As she approached the man she realized he was masturbating.
11
The Southern Landscape
Most of what I have discovered about my mother’s family history, while unfamiliar in its details, felt strangely recognizable to me on an emotional level. The curious tapestry of fact, memory, and family legend that emerged from my attic seems to suggest antecedents for certain aspects of my character that have always been mysterious to me—the occasional but intense bouts of sadness, my romanticism and tetchy sensitivity, the plodding work ethic, and my tendency toward Talmudic hairsplitting, fractiousness, and unrest. These genetic threads bind me invisibly to the past, and especially to my stoic, passionate, and sentimental grandfather, Arthur Evans.
For example, I have always been susceptible to some form of opportunistic sorrow—of the deepest, most soul-wrenching, step-off-the-cliff variety. I once burst into tears while pouring out a pot of unused salted water intended for cooking summer corn that hadn’t arrived. The terrible futility of it all, the clear beauty of the wasted liquid, enriched by salt, strange, essential, powerful, ancient salt, vortexing down the drain.
This must be the sorrow of those Welsh forebears. And now I suspect that’s where I got my tolerance for peasantlike, toilsome labor as well. When reading the detailed passages in Arthur’s journals describing his dawn-to-dusk chores that conclude “And so on, indefinitely…” I am put in mind of my own willingness to plug away in the darkroom, from dawn to way beyond dusk. Perplexing all my friends in the photography community and aggravating my family, I have always insisted on making every print myself, even the 40 × 50 inch landscapes.
For almost two decades I virtually lived in the darkroom, figuring out how my problematic negatives should be printed and struggling with my enlarger, a 1919 Eastman Projection Printer that possesses a level of technological sophistication that would cause a caveman to drum his fingers with impatience. Each day I would make as many prints as my washers could hold (twelve) or as I could stand to make. I would often reprint an image several days in a row, tossing out hundreds of sheets of (now precious) silver printing paper, noting each day’s detailed printing instructions on the negative’s envelope.
Often enough, some end-of-tether frustrations are penciled in exhausted scrawl (“Please spare me from ever having to print this again”) or, on another envelope: “THIRD fucking printing: If I ever have to print this goddamn picture again, heaven forbid, watch contrast/darkness in lower half and…”
When all was going well, I would print a new picture each weekday, starting early on Monday after getting the children off to school, usually around 8:30. If I worked steadily, making test strips of each section of the print, I could finally stitch together all the tests and make the first full print after lunch. Once I studied it further, I usually spent a few more hours tweaking the tiny details, burning here, dodging there. Then, after walking the kids from school and getting them settled in with homework, the robotic, factory-like production of the final prints would begin, rarely ending until the late night hours.
The next three days were the same until Friday, when, with the help of a series of long-suffering assistants, all the prints from the week were flattened and obsessively inspected for imperfections in surface or variations in print quality.
The weekends were spent rewashing and reflattening any prints that had emulsion problems, updating the editions book, sleeving and then filing the completed week’s work. Then on Monday, I would start over again, “And so on, indefinitely…”
As I got to know my grandfather through his writings in the archive, I found kinship with him in the perseverance and attention to detail common
to both our working lives, and in other ways as well. (Although I like to think I wouldn’t have been so spineless as to end up living in the “sky parlour” while my spouse cheated on me downstairs. But who’s to say?) He earned his living as a writer, albeit at rather pedestrian jobs, and went to great pains to set down the story of his life for his two daughters. But it is when he writes of his work in the landscape that I feel a particular affinity, despite the geographic disparity between Farmer Skaden’s fields and my own. His occasionally overwrought prose accords especially well with my own hiraeth-rich writing from the 1970s, and it, in turn, aligns with the landscape photographs I made in the 1990s.
That inherent relationship between my writing and photography has never been clearer to me than it is now. The early poetic language and my later elegiac landscapes each served as primary, repeating threads running through my life, the warp and woof of memory and desire. Look, for example, at how this short essay I wrote in January 1969 ties in with a picture I made some twenty-three years later:
A Summer Passing
The air of late August lies heavily on our land with the thickness of water. Moving through it, I feel the fluidity of the heat suck at me, then swirl away at my passage. I drive slowly so as not to raise the dust. There are ripples of heat in the valleys, and when a faint breeze arises, the forms of torpid cattle appear in the dry motion of the high grasses.
This is the upper field, high above the river, which funnels the eye toward the looming mountain. Now, in the rising heat, its form can barely be seen, although it is just a few miles away. I look for it and barely see the outline in the sullen gray of mid-afternoon.
The trees appear exhausted with drought; the morning dew is quickly gone and the limp leaves droop. The only sound is the chirring of grasshoppers and cicadas. When they pause, seemingly at once, there is complete silence over the fields.
I begin my descent into a small dip in the field and the fringe of grasses at the edge ripples as I pass. I can see the moist spot where the summer catnip grows. I pull off the two dusty ruts and head toward the patch of green, catching the first wisps of mint and moisture. The air is fragrant and cooler. I pause in the stillness for a moment, then climb again toward the gate and back into the sun. A cow stirs but does not rise at my passing.
Remember how difficult it was for me up there at Putney? The penetrating nostalgia and longing I felt for the farm, the love paeans I wrote about it? “A Summer Passing” was one of them, written for an English assignment from Ray Goodlatte. It was meant to be a “rendering,” which I gather from Ray’s red notations throughout the first draft is a form of writing allowing only objective absolutes; no metaphor, no ambiguity, just the facts, ma’am. Not exactly my strong suit.
I couldn’t be expected to render my passion for the farm in such spare language, especially this particular part, the upper fields. I wrote about those velvety undulations over and over again, even while on the beaches of Paros in 1972, when I should have been having the time of my life. It’s hard to imagine, but there I was, looking out at the wine-dark and pining for them:
… Where all my life
By the one river
The upper field…
The one place
This has become
All grief
And all desire
For me.
And if I couldn’t do justice with words and certainly not the “just the facts, ma’am” kind, I tried with my camera, composing silver poems of tone and undertow, the imagery saturated still with the words of authors I read in my teenage years—Faulkner, Whitman, Merwin, and Rilke. Many of my (poem-)photographs would sing those words, heady with beauty, ponderous with loss, right back to them.
That visual-verbal love song tuned up in earnest for me on a late morning in July 1992 when I took the first serious southern landscape, a day in which the heat was exactly as I described it in “A Summer Passing.” We were living at the cabin and several other people had come for the weekend. The river was already dotted with bobbing children, their excited cries bouncing off the cliffs. I pulled on a thin shift and loaded my camera into the truck, not really knowing what I was going to photograph but feeling the need. Larry, feeling another need, offered to go with me, and we took off for the upper fields.
I had been undeviatingly photographing the kids since 1985, remarking once to a friend that my passion for those pictures was so intense and blinkered that I could drive right past the moonrise at Hernandez that so dazzled Ansel Adams if I was on the way to get a good picture of the kids. But on that July day, I was overcome with farm lust, wordless and undeniable. Driving with the camera from the cool river to the sweltering upper fields, we followed the animal pathways through the grass, stopping to make an occasional picture.
At the time, I didn’t care whether the pictures I was taking were any good, or how I was going to inscribe my deep love of place, this time with photography, in a way that could begin to explain it. I hadn’t made a picture in the landscape for at least a decade, although recently I had found myself swiveling the camera away from the kids just to watch the randomly edited tableaux pass across the milky rectangle of ground glass. Often a beautiful landscape would surprise me there, ambushing me with the allure of its self-sufficiency.
And I was, at that time, conspicuously vulnerable to ambush. The children were reaching the age I referred to as filial shear, and as the landscapes overtook my family pictures, their figures began to recede from my gaze. In this, one of the very last of my large-format photographs of the three of them together, the children are but tiny distant blurs, attenuated by the heat waves coming off a quenched bonfire.
This gradual move from the family pictures to the landscapes was a shift from what I thought of as our private, individual memories to the more public, emotional memories, those that the past discloses through traces inscribed on our surroundings. Working in the inexhaustible natural pageant before me, I came to wonder if the artist who commands the landscape might in fact hold the key to the secrets of the human heart: place, personal history, and metaphor. Since my place and its story were givens, it remained for me to find those metaphors; encoded, half-forgotten clues within the southern landscape.
There were plenty of those clues that July morning in the upper pastures, where the vine-oppressed trees looked like stooped giants shambling along what had once been a fence line, and a plangent humidity filled the fields, exactly the way it did when I wrote in March 1969:
A heavy scent of honeysuckle hung
In thick, sweet layers over the land
And the ripples of heat echoed the rhythm
Of vines twined around the trunks of trees,
Dangling from their branches.
Larry and I drove slowly through the pastures to what we now call Dead Boy Hill, just to the left of the catnippy swale I had described in my “rendering” twenty-three years earlier. We set up the camera, facing east toward the Blue Ridge. In the primordial, mint-and-honeysuckle-smelling stew of midsummer, the platters of Queen Anne’s lace balanced motionless on their spindly supports and the distant hills were muzzy with moisture.
The lens I was using was from the old rosewood 5 × 7 inch camera that my father had used when he was young man in Dallas. It was uncoated, susceptible to flare, and barely covered my 8 × 10 inch film. Because the shutter was sluggish and unpredictable, I always set a shorter time than my light meter suggested. I took a few pictures, bracketing to either side of the recommended exposure time to accommodate the vagaries of the system.
When I pushed the dark slide into the last film holder, I felt my impatient husband pushing against me and my dress rising up around my hips. And there we were again, just like the lovers of 1970 when I wrote of us in just such a moment, also here on the farm and in these same fields:
Our breath
Caught like a needle
On the skin of water
You said “Will it be here?”
“Here where the grass
And I thought
Yes
Yes here
Certain moments in the creative process, moments when I am really seeing, are weirdly expansive, and I develop a hyperattuned visual awareness, like the aura-ringed optical field before a migraine. Radiance coalesces about the landscape, rich in possibility, supercharged with something electric, insistent. Time slows down, becomes ecstatic.
I once read an account by Hollis Frampton about a man named Breedlove, who broke the world land speed record on the Bonneville Salt Flats. Near the end of his second run, his car spun out of control at 620 miles per hour, severing telephone poles, flying through the air, and crashing into a salt pond.
Emerging unscathed, somehow, Breedlove was asked by a reporter to describe his feelings. Speaking on tape for an hour and thirty-five minutes, he described in a sequential and deliberate way what occurred in a period of 8.7 seconds. In this detailed 9,500-word monologue, Breedlove indicated that in the interests of brevity he was condensing his account, doing his polite best to summarize a much longer story. As Frampton points out, “his ecstatic utterance represents… a temporal expansion in the ratio of some 655 to 1.”
It’s a good thing that I usually photograph by myself, because I fear such a ratio could be applied to my own utterances when the good pictures are coming. Profligate physical beauty is easy to find in the South, but what gins up the ecstasy is the right light, the resonant, beating heart of that light, unique to the South. The landscape appears to soften before your eyes and becomes seductively vague, as if inadequately summoned up by some shiftless creator casually neglectful of the details.