Hold Still

by Sally Mann

  In any case, for those six weeks, while my parents were visiting the Dauras in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie and traveling around Europe, I was living at Boxerwood with Gee-Gee and the dogs. It was my first year at school and since Gee-Gee didn’t drive, Clayton Campbell, the local taxi operator from whom Larry and I bought our plot of scrubland decades later, would arrive every morning at 7:30. I would climb into the backseat, where my feet didn’t touch the floorboards, and Mr. Campbell would drive me to the whites-only public school, a tall-windowed, white-columned dump of a place with what Cy used to call “proper proportions.”

  I have no idea how Mrs. Huffman, my first-grade teacher, could have thought that an appropriate test of her students’ readiness to transition to second grade was for each of them to choose and perform, unaccompanied, a song before the entire class. But she did, so Gee-Gee and I got out the Fireside Book of Folksongs and went through the index. Although Gee-Gee’s hand repeatedly flipped the index pages toward Part Four, the Old Hymns and Spirituals, I went for “Clementine,” in the Ballads and Old Favorites section.

  Painstakingly I learned all six stanzas of the song, including the peculiar conclusion.

  On the morning of our final exam, the class singing performance, Gee-Gee dressed me in the too-big homemade dress with tatting on the collar that she favored, and the taxi came to pick me up a little early.

  Despite having sung “Clementine” all the way through for Gee-Gee that morning, I was terrified and could barely convince my party shoes to climb the stairs to the school entrance. Like many public buildings of the time, the main hallways of the school were spread with sawdust to absorb the puke and piss that were unavoidable in those primary grades. As soon as I walked through the door I could smell that it had already been put to the test. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who was terrified.

  One by one, my classmates were called to the front of the class to sing, all of them visibly shaking, some simply unable to perform. Memories of my performance of “Clementine” are mercifully unavailable to me, but I am not so lucky with this other: when Gee-Gee came to the classroom to pick me up and collect my final report card, I remember being afraid that my classmates would think she was my mother. I can hardly bear to even write these words.

  On Sundays while my parents were abroad, Gee-Gee would dress us both up and take me with her to church.

  It mattered a great deal to Gee-Gee how I looked when I went out with her. My lace-edged white socks had to be folded just right over my ankles, the frothy crinoline adjusted with the straps at the shoulders to exactly the level of my hem, and we both wore hats and gloves. Gee-Gee would not let us roll down the windows of Mr. Campbell’s taxi for fear of mussing my hair, and by the time we reached the church, it was sweltering.

  The dark sanctuary was sweltering, too. At the door, church elders handed out cardboard fans with a white-faced Jesus on them. With the rest of the white-gloved female congregants, we worked the fans metronomically, to little effect. Knowing nothing about church, I stood and knelt when Gee-Gee did, and we shared a hymnal. She had a beautiful voice and sang with the quavering, deep anguish and fervor of Odetta, whose music, with that of Joan Baez, was soon to pour nonstop from the family Victrola. When the entire congregation was in full throat, I felt as if a great wave had picked me up and was rolling me over. I went with it, tumbling like a pale piece of ocean glass, washing up outside the heavy doors at the end of the service. Blinking in the sudden sunshine of Main Street, I reached for Gee-Gee’s hand.

  Gee-Gee worked for my family until her early nineties. At age one hundred, with her hands curled into gentle claws, she died on Christmas Day, 1994. She was with us for almost fifty years, but to calculate by any form of numeric reckoning the moment-by-moment care and fidelity she tendered our family would be impossible. Yes, I know that she was paid to care for us, and that the notion of equality and reciprocity in an employer-servant relationship is inherently compromised. And I may get my ass kicked by those who think I am perpetuating the trope of the loyal housekeeper Uncle-Tomming her way to the unmarked grave. But Gee-Gee was not a caricature or a type; she was a very real and emotionally complicated person, who devoted a large amount of her time to raising an ungrateful and impertinent scalawag, the same one who now pauses to examine this relationship. I am reasonably sure Gee-Gee was as enriched, and occasionally appalled, by the experience of participating in our family as the rest of us were. And while our home may have been in some ways a replacement for her own, which was rent by racism and death, we did not take her for granted and we knew, even then, that her love was the real stuff that held our family together.

  In some kind of cosmic irony, by the time Gee-Gee died her skin was paler than mine, and her long hair was as straight, fine, and white as any North Carolina mill child’s.

  Because of her broad cheekbones, her countenance remained generous and open, only sagging a bit when she took out her teeth to soak in a glass of water by the bed. Her wrinkled skin drooped below the now-visible arm bones that appeared to be no longer up to the task of lifting the heavy hands. She had been a powerful woman, not fat, just strong, built with the ageless sculptural proportions of the workingwoman. Diego Rivera would paint her, not Lucian Freud.

  I seldom saw Gee-Gee in an everyday dress like this, but some mornings she wouldn’t be in her uniform when my father honked the horn at her house at 7:30. When that happened, she would change in the furnace room by the kitchen. For everyday work Gee-Gee wore a white uniform, but on special occasions, when she was serving a dinner party or Christmas, she would wear gray with a tiny white apron.

  I remember some rickrack around the edges somewhere, on the apron or the cuffs or both, but otherwise the effect was all business. That effect was reinforced by about a gallon of starch ironed so deeply into the fabric that I can still remember the distinctive tearing sound as Gee-Gee stuck her arms through the sleeves.

  I knew exactly how Gee-Gee had gotten to be so good at washing and ironing because I had read about it in my well-worn The Child’s Story of the Negro (1938), by Jane Dabney Shackelford.

  Ms. Shackelford (an unfortunate name for an African American if I ever heard one) explained:

  Even after the slaves were set free the Negro washerwoman had a great task to perform. Often her husband could not find work to do; but every community needed a laundress, so there was always work for her. When her husband was thrifty and worked regularly, his small earnings were often not enough to care for the family… If the children were sent away to school, their expenses were paid by a mother who was laboring over the washtub. Some of the most noted men and women of our race often tell of their noble mothers and the many sacrifices they made in order to give them an education.

  This report was congruent with the life story of my own beloved washerwoman (except that she was widowed and had no “thrifty” husband), and, at the time, the sanguine cheeriness of Ms. Shackelford’s description didn’t perplex or confound me in the least.

  On the worksheet at the end of the washerwoman chapter, I checked off the things that I did (and didn’t do) for Gee-Gee—the dids are fibs, mostly, and the didn’ts underreported by a mile.

  Gee-Gee had a problem with her feet, with finding shoes that didn’t hurt.

  I remember standing in the women’s shoe section of Leggett’s department store and watching the tiny, hunchbacked saleswoman gaping up at my mother’s gestured descriptions of Gee-Gee’s feet. I’m guessing that my mother was doing this because she thought Gee-Gee might not feel comfortable shopping at Leggett’s, where Colored and White signs on the stairway pointed to bathrooms in opposite directions. I have imprinted in my knavish memory an image of the hunchback kneeling over the barbaric-looking foot measurer clamped to Gee-Gee’s metatarsal expanse, but this wasn’t likely to have actually happened for the reason just mentioned, and also because there was no point in Gee-Gee’s shopping, with her size-thirteen feet, in a ladies’ shoe department.

  So, where did she get he
r shoes, ill-fitting though they were? Only now am I wondering about these things. What about those uniforms? Who bought them? My mother? Gee-Gee? And from where? Was washing and ironing the uniforms part of her noble washerwomanly chores? When? At night, or on Sunday? And how did she get something as simple as her groceries? She had no car; she worked for us six days a week from eight in the morning until eight at night and her house was on top of grocery-less Diamond Hill.

  I remember an ancient wooden building on the way down Diamond Hill that had a few shelves of extortionately priced canned goods, but no real grocery store until the upper part of Main Street, almost a mile away. This small store, unironically named the White Front, had excellent meat, gave out S&H Green Stamps, and it also allowed its customers, even black people, to charge food and be billed at the end of the month. I know that Gee-Gee had an account and must have shopped there, but then what? Did she haul all her week’s groceries to the top of that hill in one of those woven metal carts the way I saw so many black women doing? But, wait; were stores even open on Sundays back then?

  All these questions. The simplest, most elemental things.

  What if her kids were sick? Or what if she was sick? (But of course she never was.) What if she had cystitis or diarrhea or menstrual cramps… surely she had those. Then, when she did, what did she do with those menstrual pads during her workdays at our house? And I guess she used the kids’ bathroom; of course she did, but… when? If I ransack my memory, I think I can recall the crackle of her uniform leaving that bathroom, where she, like me, must have stared up at the etching of Napoleon on his deathbed from the toilet she cleaned.

  During the day, she wore my father’s discarded shoes, razor-sliced to accommodate the corns on her toes. But she arrived at work with her feet painfully crammed into whatever golden lily shoes she had found, wherever on earth she found them. She yanked them off as soon as things quieted down in the mornings and it was just the two of us. After wiggling her toes to restore the feeling, she would sit down on the stepstool and gratefully sink her feet into my father’s laceless shoes, her stockinged toes protruding from the side slits.

  Women wore stockings all the time then, even in the middle of the summer, and Gee-Gee would try to beat the heat by wearing hers rolled down to just above her knees instead of hooked to the dangling ends of a garter belt like my mother’s. She often wore my mother’s old silk stockings, whose gossamer runs enlarged into ladder-rungs as the day went on, the seams wobbling crazily. Stocking seams were a particular misery back then, but more for my mother than for Gee-Gee.

  It was important for my mother’s seams to run straight up her legs, two apparently converging lines that had the unintended effect of guiding the eye to their dark vanishing point. When my mother was going to town, she would close the bedroom door and twist her head around to examine her seams in the mirror. Then, a ritual familiar to almost any well-off southern white child of the 1950s would play out: powdered, lavender-scented, as cool and white as Lot’s wife, my mother would emerge from her bedroom, grab up her purse and white gloves, and try to make her getaway.

  Apparently both parties knew their roles in this drama, but to my observing eyes it seemed new each time it played out on the asphalt bib next to the black sedan beetled under the pine boughs.

  “Mrs. Munger! Mrs. Munger!!” urgently issued from the slid-open kitchen windows.

  My mother would stop, her expectant face belying the startled look she would try to put on it.

  A beat.

  “Mrs. Munger, you cannot go to town with your slip showing like that! And those seams! What would they think of me?”

  For Gee-Gee, this was not a rhetorical question. She had reason for concern. Working for a Yankee, albeit one with a Dallas-born husband, was a problem for Gee-Gee, and my parents’ oddball, liberal, atheist, country-club-shunning ways further complicated the picture. Curiously, that my mother insisted on exceeding the normal pay scale for her help, five dollars a week in the forties when they first arrived in Lexington, was no comfort for Gee-Gee. The anonymous, threatening letters my mother received as a consequence of this profligacy and the talk around town brought Gee-Gee to the attention of the community, which was not a good thing. Any black person could tell you: the less noticeable you were, the better.

  Gee-Gee learned the rules of living in white society early on, though she revealed little to us about her childhood. What we knew was this: she was born to the very young daughter of a former slave in a part of the county where freed slaves had settled, known to this day as Buck Hill. Although Gee-Gee’s mother was black, the man who raped her (or so it is logically presumed by her family) was white. It is likely that her mother died in childbirth because as an infant, Gee-Gee, born Virginia Cornelia Franklin, was brought to Lexington and raised by her mother’s sister, Mary Franklin.

  In her late teens, Gee-Gee married Wesley Carter and bore him six children, the youngest of whom was twelve when my mother, new in town and eight months pregnant with her first child, saw her coming down the post office steps. Struck by the image of this powerful, proud, and composed woman, my mother described her to my father in detail at dinner that night. By a twist of fate that to the end of her life still delighted and amazed my mother, the next day she answered a knock at the door to find the unforgettable stranger again. Virginia Carter stood tall and confident on the threshold, wearing a tweed Peck and Peck suit with a velvet collar so worn it appeared to be suede. Her broad cheekbones bespoke some Indian blood, her light eyes and almost straight hair something unspeakable. She asked if my mother needed help and was hired on the spot.

  Gee-Gee’s husband, Wesley McDowell Carter,

  worked as a presser in the laundry room of the nearby Virginia Military Institute. He had problems with alcohol, and more than once Gee-Gee came to work troubled, her face blotchy. One night in the back room of the store on Diamond Street he rose from the card table, headed down the basement stairs, and fell, breaking his neck. Apparently, no one noticed right away, and it was more than a day before Gee-Gee was taken to his body.

  Left with six children and a public education system for which she paid taxes but which forbade classes for black children beyond the seventh grade, Gee-Gee managed somehow to send each of them to out-of-state boarding schools and, ultimately, to college.

  How did a widowed black woman pay for the housing, the food, the travel, and the tuition to educate six children?

  By working twelve hours a day and by taking in linens to iron at night, linens stuffed into white sacks crowding her front door when my father took her home after all day on her feet at our house. What did he think when he saw those bags?

  What were any of us thinking? Why did we never ask the questions?

  That’s the mystery of it—our blindness and our silence.

  Once in my early twenties, at one of the Friday night W&L cocktail parties, I went into the kitchen where a heron-like black woman bent over a sink washing glasses, her frilly uniform cap perched like a cockscomb above her glistening scalp. I struck up a conversation with her, and at first it was the usual pleasantries. When she learned who my father was, she straightened, turned from the sink, and, with her beaky eye on mine, said, “You can’t know what it’s like being colored. But I want you to know something about Dr. Munger. He always treated us like we were no different from white people. He didn’t ever see color.”

  She turned back to her work, and when she was done with the dishes, I walked with her out the back door and watched her untie and fold up her apron, which she placed in the cardboard box I was holding for her. She leaned over and with flat palms to either side of her calves rolled her stockings down over her knees and off her long toes, putting them in the box, too. Then she stuck her bare feet back into her white service shoes and set off for home.

  At the time, Larry and I lived close to the post office, where twenty-four-hour access to the mail slot invited the too-hasty deposit of a letter I drunkenly wrote to my father as soon as I go
t back from the party. I told him about the conversation with the birdwoman and expressed my admiration and love for him, a practice strongly disapproved of in our family. Our parents had installed in each of us an emotional thermostat with the dial turned down far enough to discourage even routine expressions of affection.

  It was after midnight that Friday when I posted the envelope, addressed formally to Dr. Robert S. Munger. I envisioned it to the left of his placemat at lunch on Monday, the ivory-handled letter opener at the ready.

  The instant my fingers released the letter into the brass slot, which read “Local Mail,” I regretted it. The letter was over the top in every respect—for Chrissake, it was a love letter to my father. Suddenly sober and aghast, I fluttered my fingers into the slot, pushing my narrow wrist bones through the opening and working my arm up to the elbow. I waggled my fingers but touched nothing. Pressing further, my elbow bones now crammed into the opening, I twisted my arm to the side. Nothing. For a brief, horrible minute I thought I might not be able to retract my arm, but with some maneuvering I fetched it back. Cradling it against my stomach, I walked home.

  Saturday morning I felt like crap, but kept my long-standing luncheon appointment at my parents’ house. These lunches were important to Gee-Gee, and she went all-out on the menu. I found my father seated alone at the table, a small glass of sherry and his allotment of peanuts centered on the placemat before him, the mail stacked neatly to his left. He was staring out at his gardens with his usual mien of abstracted contemplation.