Hold Still

by Sally Mann

  Or my eyes, when I emerged and saw him. He didn’t look mean or angry at all; in fact, he had the benign, lazy look of somebody who’d gotten into a sizeable mess of nookie the night before. Hiking himself up on his tailgate while I shot this picture, his eyes now intent beneath the tufted beam of his brow, he tore out page after page from a spiral-bound notebook on which he had drawn maps of other easily trespassable places.

  By the time I packed up my stuff, he had stacked a chaddy-edged pile of scribbled pages on my passenger seat, promised to call his friends to ensure their help, and invited me back to meet the missus. The proverbial hospitality of the South may be selectively extended but it is not a myth. The man was as gracious to this brazen trespasser as if I were Tocqueville back for a second visit.

  The whole trip was like that: kind people, moldering ruins around every turn, and perfect weather, like some parallel state of grace. Everywhere I went, even the drabbest, most mongrelly backwash was enlightened by a glimmer of possibility.

  One evening, after a day of driving, I stopped at the edge of a raw expanse of logged-over red clay. From the open window of a nearby newly built fake plantation home, naked of trees and propped up with Styrofoam columns, came the ravishingly beautiful, perfectly phrased chords of Beethoven’s Pathétique sonata. Transfixed, I leaned against the Suburban as the familiar notes, infused with a professional passion and restraint, drifted across the wasteland. Unrestrained myself, I walked up the porch steps, cupping my hands against the flyspecked window screen to discover within the pianist Simone Dinnerstein sitting before a Chickering grand piano, attended on her right by a man who had suffered the ravages of leprosy. At once: the humdrum and the miraculous, the inelegant and the ineffable.

  The South is made up of such contradictions and juxtapositions: the gracious splendor of its lost world founded on a monstrous crime and the often retrograde, repellent politics of its modern one elucidated in an accent and vernacular that are lyrical like no other. A culture in which a spritely little blue-hair, while ringing the foot bell under the dining room rug for minted sweet tea to be served, can say, twinkling with pleasure at the memory, “Oh how I miss Jasper. I got that nigger from the warden at Parchman and kept him ’til he died.” And this in a honeyed and melodious accent that for a moment sugarcoats the hateful words.

  The sound of the language: I once knew a woman who hired a man with a mellifluous southern accent to read to her young son each night so that he would always remember those pulpy vowels, the gentle mitigation of the consonants. The reader was from South Carolina and spoke with a wetlands calm, but to my ear the most beguiling accent of all belonged to the Mississippian Shelby Foote. Like most of America, I had fallen in love with his speaking voice in Ken Burns’s Civil War documentary, but before that I had fixated on his earlier, written one, especially in the passage from his novel Shiloh, quoted at the outset of this book, about southerners being “in love with the past… in love with death.”

  On one of my trips, I passed through Memphis, where Foote had lived since 1952, and, finding him listed in the phone book, drove around his neighborhood with the deluded yearning of a groupie, hoping to find him walking his dog or pressing quarters into a parking meter outside a coffee shop.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised that I didn’t find him; I had learned that my quarry was elusive the year before, when I tried to get permission from Foote to use those lines from Shiloh in an exhibition catalog. Each time I called he was out of town. Two nights before we were to go to press, I conferred with Edwynn Houk, whose gallery was publishing the catalog, and, having no permission, we reluctantly agreed we’d have to pull the quote. The next morning, Edwynn was riding the train into Manhattan and overheard a couple talking about the adventures they’d had downtown the night before… with Shelby Foote! Tapping the nearer traveler on the shoulder, Edwynn introduced himself, explained the problem, and was rewarded with Foote’s location in the city, from which written permission was speedily dispatched.

  But it seemed that was as close as I was going to come to hearing his voice in person, so I gave up the search in Memphis and stopped by instead to see my friend the photographer Bill Eggleston, in his magnolia-shaded brick home, stumbling into a midday birthday celebration. As we sat around the table, Leigh Haizlip, Bill’s longtime girlfriend, came dreamily down the stairs dressed in a 1940s slip that I would swear was the very one worn by Maggie the Cat. Her hair was tangled, her face puffy with sleep, and her breasts swayed inside the nylon boob pockets. She was the sexiest, most ravishing creature I had ever seen, moving toward us like an underwater plant, stopping to pour a glass of bourbon.

  If those had been my five birthday candles, I would be wishing to look at that sight forever, but who knows what Bill’s wish was. He made it, and we ate the cake and took a stroll in the backyard, where there was a small, old-fashioned pool. Then I mentioned Shelby Foote. Bill brightened and said, Good Lord, of course he knew Shelby, so let’s go right on over to his place and say hi. Delightedly I piled into Bill’s car, which looked to have belonged to his grandmother, and off we went.

  Fan that I was, I clung to every word of Bill’s Shelby Foote stories until he said that the last time he’d gone over to visit Shelby unannounced like this in midafternoon, Shelby’d answered the door in his boxer shorts. Whoa, I said, no, no, no, we can’t take that chance, and reluctantly we reversed course. I left Memphis richer for having seen the vision of Leigh but poorer in the Foote department. The next day, after one more lowlife night in a campground, I headed down toward civilization at Bill’s first cousin Maude Clay’s place in Sumner, Mississippi.

  As always, I picked the least traveled, most remote roads, exiguous pale blue lines on the map, certain in my bones of the memories residing there. Driving through those vine-hung dirt roads, the slender grasses on the verge bent with dust, I was improbably enough listening to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness on tape. Though a world apart from Africa, it was impossible for me not to think of the misery extracted at every turn in those roads, just as it had been impossible for Marlow to paddle up the Congo unaware of the “groves of death” lying within the shadows along the riverbank. For me, the Deep South was haunted by the souls of the millions of African Americans who built that part of the country with their hands and with the sweat and blood of their backs. I was moving among shades, aware, always, of their presence.

  Flannery O’Connor once said that the South is Christ-haunted, but I say it’s death-haunted, pain-haunted, cruelty-haunted—just haunted, period. I knew my pictures were haunted, too, but in a different way from the ones I had made closer to home. I had come south looking not so much for the scars of the Civil War, but for something even more fundamental and, paradoxically, more elusive.

  The pictures I wanted to take were about the rivers of blood, of tears, and of sweat that Africans poured into the dark soil of their thankless new home. I was looking for images of the dead as they are revealed in the land and in its adamant, essential renewal. One death in particular had haunted me since childhood, that of Emmett Till, which took place in Maude Clay’s home territory. On my way there, I traced the route his murderers had taken in his last hours, beginning with the fateful (and possibly apocryphal) wolf whistle in Money, Mississippi, passing along the Tallahatchie River,

  and winding up on a balmy, serenely yellowish afternoon at the very boat lock from which fourteen-year-old Emmett was heaved into the river, naked, blinded, beaten, a cotton gin fan lashed with barbed wire to his neck. When I visited, Emmett Till’s murder was conspicuously unremarked upon in Sumner (although recently Maude sent me this picture of a sign that was erected on the newly cleared riverbank and immediately shot up)

  so I was lucky to have Maude, the granddaughter of the former owner of the land, to show me the exact site. It was a trek, well off the road and isolated from any signs of life. She helped me carry my camera, bushwhacking a path alongside the cotton fields to the water’s edge, and I was glad for her comp
any, feeling unusually vulnerable and alone.

  Having pushed our way through the thick brush and scraggly trees to get to the riverbank, I was disappointed by the humdrum, backwashy scene before me. How could a place so weighted with historical pain appear to be so ordinary? Was there a photograph anywhere in this unalluring scrub?

  I put on my photo-eyes and squinted into the hazy afternoon sun. With my hands I formed a rough 8 × 10-inch dimension, cropping out the old wringer washing machine caught in the vines upriver, imagining the sun breaking all the Kodak rules by milkily pouring into my wide-open lens aperture. I set up the camera with increasing excitement. There was, in fact, something mysterious about the spot; I could see it and feel it, and when I released the shutter I asked for forgiveness from Emmett Till.

  Fighting our way back out of the brush, we were startled to come face-to-face with a water-stained piece of lined notebook paper tacked to a spindly trash tree, admonishing us to confess our sins. So many sins, indeed: the voice of Emmett Till, the voices of myriad others like him, an irrepressible chorus of pain, humiliation, and deferred hopes.

  Maude drove with me the next afternoon on the dirt access roads alongside the cotton fields, mile after mile. We chatted as we drove, but even distracted as I was I still slammed on the brakes when I saw the roughly human-shaped concrete mound off to the side of the fields.

  “Oh,” said Maude airily, “it’s how they bury people out here in the summer,” and, sure enough, at the bulbous end of the mound were the remnants of one of those plastic funeral wreaths designed to be stuck into ground more yielding than this.

  I wondered who lay beneath that concrete. Could my deadbeat, drunk great-grandfather Thomas Evans have been uneasily buried on just such a piece of marginal southern land? How does one come to be entombed with a gusher-load of concrete? Did this person die working in the cotton fields and then someone pragmatically called for a cement truck to pour a sarcophagus atop the body?

  Out in the middle of nowhere, I contemplated this paradoxical scene so emblematic of the plucky, undiminished South, a no-frills monument to the intractability of the overworked soil and the practical, impoverished, generous people who have long tried to wring a living from it.

  Ever since those lonely, purplish Putney nights, reading and writing about the South, I have tried to nail down just what it is that makes it at once so alluring and so repellent, like fruit on the verge of decay. Ultimate beauty requires that edge of sweet decay, just as our casually possessed lives are made more precious by a whiff of the abyss. We southerners, like Proust, have come to believe that the only true perfection is a lost perfection, buying into our own myth of loss by creating a flimflam romance out of resounding historical defeat. In that nexus between myth and reality we live uncomfortably, our cultural sorrows, our kindheartedness, and our snoot-cocking, renegade defiance playing out against a backdrop of profligate physical beauty.

  Every time for me, it’s the beauty of the southern landscape that fires up that irresistible melancholy of golden nostalgia and inflames my genetically ordained hiraeth, spiraling down the DNA chains, southern-style. On these trips down South I succumbed to it without a fight.

  I am reminded of the character in The Prince of Tides who said to his sister’s shrink, “Southerners don’t look at sentimentality as a flaw of character, Lowenstein.” Southern artists, and especially writers, have long been known for their susceptibility to myth and their obsession with place, family, death, and the past. Many of us appear inescapably preoccupied with our historical predicament and uniqueness, which, as the southern novelist Andrew Lytle once remarked, we can no more escape than a Renaissance painter could avoid painting the Virgin Mary.

  My friend Niall MacKenzie, with his Canadian perspective, notes that we southern artists also display a conspicuous willingness to use doses of romance that would be fatal to anyone else. He likens us to the religious traditionalists of the Appalachians who handle venomous snakes without fear. What snake venom is to them, romance is to the southern artist: a terrible risk, but also a ticket to transcendence.

  Occasionally on my travels, I drew that ticket, moving in the slow motion of ecstatic time, like Leigh dreamily descending the stairs. In my revisionist memories, I hardly recall those hundreds of miles offering no chance of a good photograph this side of the Second Coming. I have forgotten the many suppers of saltine crackers washed down with iceless gin, or the ballads I sang to keep myself awake on the highway, which even Emmylou could not have made remotely non-milk-curdling, or the nights sleeping in the backseat of the Suburban while the windows of the neighboring camper pulsed with blue TV light.

  No, instead all that I remember is the rare, heart-pounding, brake-squealing lurch to the verge after glimpsing a potential image. My memories are of those euphoric moments of visual revelation, still fluorescing for me like threads in a tapestry in which most other colors have faded, leaving a few brightly, and sometimes wrongly, predominant. Tightly woven in the tapestry are the images I made, themselves informed by the inextricable past and its companions: loss, time, and love. In these pictures, and in the writing of them, the dropped stitch between the sentimental Welshman and his descendant is repurled. And the story depicted in the irregular weave is of a place extravagant in its beauty, reckless in its fecundity, terrible in its indifference, and dark with memories.

  PART III

  Gee-Gee: The Matter of Race

  12

  The Many Questions

  Down here, you can’t throw a dead cat without hitting an older, well-off white person raised by a black woman, and every damn one of them will earnestly insist that a reciprocal and equal form of love was exchanged between them. This reflects one side of the fundamental paradox of the South: that a white elite, determined to segregate the two races in public, based their stunningly intimate domestic arrangements on an erasure of that segregation in private. Could the feelings exchanged between two individuals so hypocritically divided ever have been honest, untainted by guilt or resentment?

  I think so. Cat-whacked and earnest, I am one of those who insist that such a relationship existed for me. I loved Gee-Gee the way other people love their parents, and no matter how many historical demons stalked that relationship, I know that Gee-Gee loved me back.

  My late friend the writer Reynolds Price repeatedly emphasized the importance to white children of this intimate care, especially to the writers and artists of the South, and he was right to do so. For many of us, being high-strung, odd, and complicated, it was crucial. As a child, I didn’t have to ask myself if I was loved, a not entirely unreasonable question in the sometimes indifferent atmosphere of our household. Gee-Gee’s love was unconditional, a concept I might never have believed in had I not experienced it. When the dogs and I came in panting and filthy from our adventures, Gee-Gee sent the cringing hounds away and made sure I had what I needed: food, a story, or a bath. And when I was teased to tears by my brothers and father, or scared, or hurt, I never wondered if I would be protected or comforted. I always was—by Gee-Gee.

  Most mornings when I was very young, Gee-Gee would set me up on a yellow stepstool by the sink so that I could plunge my arms into the warm, sudsy water and mess around with the tin cups and mixing bowls she’d put in there. This activity would keep me occupied long enough so that Gee-Gee could get the clothes sprinkled and rolled up in preparation for the afternoon’s weighty application of the iron. But one day, she had forgotten that there was a glass in the sink, and when it broke, it deeply sliced my little finger. I began squalling, and Gee-Gee rushed to me, pulling me from the stool and into her arms. I hollered more loudly when I saw the raw terror on her usually imperturbable face. Wrapping my bleeding finger in a dishtowel, she frantically tried to dial my father’s office while I plunged and wailed in her arms.

  My mother emerged from the cool of the bedroom wing and took over the phone, speaking levelly to Edna, my father’s secretary. Hanging up, she assured us he was on his way. Gee-Ge
e carried me, still howling, to a chair in the dining room, where, at a certain angle, the road was visible. She rocked and comforted me, but it became clear at some point that it was she who needed the comforting. Gee-Gee was crying as she watched for the yellow streak of my father’s car coming around the bend at the top of the hill.

  No one ever doubted who really ran the household, and my mother used to joke about her own dispensability. Gee-Gee had long ago mastered what William Carlos Williams called “the customs of necessity,” and to her devolved almost all the intimate aspects of our family life, the cooking, laundry, and sheet changing. After my brothers went away to school, I think she was mostly tasked with raising a lonely child in a household that cared very little for children. In 1958, three days before my seventh birthday, my parents went to France for six weeks to visit friends, including Pierre Daura, Cy Twombly’s early art teacher (Daura’s own early teacher had been Picasso’s father, José Ruiz y Blasco).

  In the late 1920s, Daura, a Spanish artist of some renown, and his friend the French artist Jean Hélion, had fallen for a pair of Richmond, Virginia, sisters studying in Paris. These well-brought-up girls summered about four miles from our farm, in Rockbridge Baths, so called because of mineral springs that bubbled up into a crude, algae-lined pool near their house. In exactly the same way as so many before and after them, these two European artists fell in love with Rockbridge County and spent their summers here, hanging out with their new American friends, my parents. I spent many summer afternoons of my childhood in that slimy pool, every inch of my body bubble-wrapped (a packaging concept as yet undreamed-of) with teeny-tiny sulfurous beads. Maybe one of those afternoons it was Cy I saw slipping into Daura’s home for a lesson, its walls hung, salon-style, with two small Cézannes, paintings of the French landscape, portraits of Daura’s wife and daughter, all topped off with a gorgeous School of Caravaggio over the stairs.