Hold Still

by Sally Mann

  We spoke briefly, and I went over to the sherry bottle to pour out a medicinal hair of the dog. Snagging a Harper’s magazine from the mail, I sat at my place and began to read. When we were done with the sherry, Gee-Gee poured iced tea into the unusually tall glasses that the Esso station gave out with gasoline purchases, then set the warmed plates on the mats. While he was waiting for the food, Daddy picked up the letter opener and began slitting the tops of the envelopes, one by one.

  Bills, advertisements, and then, to my stomach-heaving horror, there in his hands was my letter. How had it gotten here in less than twelve hours? What about the Monday delivery? He slit it open, extracted the page of over-wrought prose, and read it through, pausing to take a cooling sip of iced tea.

  He turned to me a bit quizzically, closed his eyes, and lowered his head in a bow, refolded the letter, and reached for the next envelope. Gee-Gee arrived with the fried apples and we began to eat. No further mention of the letter, ever, although after his death I found it in a file with a heading something like “Worth Saving.”

  The hands that were serving the lunch that day were bigger than my father’s, with thick, heavily ridged nails glowing like pale beacons at the tips of the fingers. With unlikely balletic grace, Gee-Gee lowered the silver serving dishes to our left, two passes at each meal, a third if biscuits were involved.

  Likely there were biscuits that Saturday lunch, as she always made them when we had fried apples and bacon. The apples came from an old orchard above the house and were small, green ones, Pippin or Northern Spy, and difficult to peel. Difficult for me, that is, but not for Gee-Gee. She would sit on the stepstool, the large bowl of apples beside her on the chest freezer, and, with a paring knife, unfurl a spiral of continuous peel, the whitening apple rotating in her pink palm.

  When she was done, catching up the loopy tangle of peels in her apron, she would dump them in the compost bucket and carry the apples to the counter by the stove. Sinking a wooden spoon into the bacon grease stored in a sawed-off tin can, she would put the skillet on the burner and start the biscuits. Assuming the warm top step of the stool she had vacated, I would watch her from behind as she rolled out the dough and twisted the rim of a jelly glass into it, trapping the circle of dough in it long enough for her to shake it out onto the cookie sheet.

  As far as I could tell, Gee-Gee herself never ate anything, save occasionally when she checked the seasoning from a pot on the stove. Otherwise, the only thing I ever saw pass her lips was ice water from a tin measuring cup that sweated on the counter. Maybe it was a good thing that she never needed to eat, because when we traveled together, as we did for vacations on the Eastern Shore, she could not enter the restaurants. When we stopped to eat at the Howard Johnson’s, gratefully throwing open the doors of the hot car, Gee-Gee stayed behind.

  Looking out from the big windows of the air-conditioned dining room, we could see her cooling herself with a First Baptist Church fan, Jesus’s white face serenely waving in the backseat. Emerging from the restaurant with a tin-foil-wrapped cheese sandwich for Gee-Gee, which she would demurely place in her lap, and a Dixie Cup of water, which she would drink, we would resume our trip as if this were perfectly normal.

  It’s that obliviousness, the unexamined assumption, that so pains me now: nothing about it seemed strange, nothing seemed wrong. I never wondered where she peed on the trips to visit my brothers at school in Vermont. Could she hold it until we crossed the Pennsylvania border and the restrooms were integrated? Did any of us, besides her, wonder about that, about what would happen if she just had to go? How could I not have thought it strange that Gee-Gee not only never ate anything but also never had to go, never even got out of the car? How could I not have wondered, not have asked?

  Like my two brothers, at Putney School I studied under a rotund, pipe-smoking, green-eyed black man named Jeff Campbell. It was Jeff who assigned, with the infinite despair of the defiler, the novels of William Faulkner.

  Through the cold Vermont nights, the windows of my dorm room steamed up with southern gothic as I huddled under the bright Hudson’s Bay blankets, grimly annotating the books Jeff had assigned: Light in August, Absalom, Absalom, The Sound and the Fury. My homesick romanticism thrummed to the melodrama: the violence, the undertones of sexual threat, the sense of moldering decadence, the cursed inheritance, and, of course, the inevitable haunted home place. That haunted home place, a metaphor for the South itself, was a house divided by the institution of slavery.

  I am sure Jeff Campbell knew, as his long-nailed fingers, the forefinger yellowed from pipe-tamping, placed Absalom, Absalom like a sacerdotal biscuit in my palm, that this would be my moment of awakening, the one described by Graham Greene as the door to the future, after which the world is never again seen in quite the same way. Faulkner threw wide the door of my ignorant childhood, and the future, the heartbroken future filled with the hitherto unasked questions, strolled easefully in. It wounded me, then and there, with the great sadness and tragedy of our American life, with the truth of all that I had not seen, had not known, and had not asked.

  The graduation ceremonies for the Putney School class of 1969 were held on a weekend in early June. My parents and Gee-Gee arrived Friday, and I could tell that Gee-Gee was not pleased with what she was seeing. The children of the wealthy were dressed like field hands, with dreadlocked hair and dirt between their toes. Gee-Gee glared at a black kid from my algebra class, and when he flashed the peace sign at her, his arm around a bell-bottom-wearing blond girl, she turned from him with a snort of disgust.

  Oh, Gee-Gee, I thought despairingly: This is the future. Up here, we’re all one.

  Gee-Gee was having none of it.

  On graduation morning I was late getting to the dining hall for breakfast, and all the tables were gone. Benches for the graduates and chairs for the visitors had been arranged at the eastern end of the room, with a processional aisle in the middle. The hall appeared to be empty, but squinting against the sun I saw a lone figure substantially anchoring the first row of the audience seating. Staring straight ahead, white-gloved hands folded in her lap and her back not even touching the back of the chair, sat Gee-Gee.

  She must have brought with her that dreadnought of an ancient iron with which she had sent all six of her children through school, because she was wearing a perfectly pressed linen dress. It was a pale yellow, and centered above her bun was a pillbox hat made of the same fabric. A necklace of white plastic orbs, resembling the South Sea pearls that you now see oppressing the thin collarbones of ladies who lunch, complemented Gee-Gee’s powerfully muscled neck. The skin swelled out above her too-small white pumps and her stockings had compression puckers where the toes were mashed in. No one had stocking seams anymore, but in every other respect she was as elegant and imposing as a dowager queen. (This picture of her at my brother Bob’s college graduation a few years before my Putney graduation will give you some idea as to that serene elegance—especially in relation to her obnoxious charge.)

  Before it occurred to me that a Styrofoam cup was absolutely out of the question, I walked over to her and offered her coffee in one. The concept of paper plates, cups, napkins, or plastic anything was anathema to Gee-Gee. It was she who kept the silver polished, the Wedgwood plates interleaved with circles cut from grocery bags, and the glasses wiped with old diapers washed so many times they were airy as cheesecloth. But to my surprise she accepted the coffee, and we sat for a while in the soft June sun.

  A few hours later as the room began to fill for the ceremony, she was still in the same chair. When my parents arrived, my father stood to the side while my mother, in a prim little hat, slipped into the seat next to Gee-Gee. Directly behind them sat Ethel Kennedy, wearing white patent-leather boots, her brood sprawling around her, their shirts unpressed and hanging out of their khakis.

  My mother and father leaned toward each other occasionally to exchange some whispered observation, but Gee-Gee remained straight-backed, staring ahead. I knew the wa
rning signs. Her distress, even her occasional anger, was always accompanied by an ineffable and profound sadness: always the pursed lips, the closing of the eyes, perhaps onto visions of injustice and outrage, and the slow, tired shaking of her head, usually accompanied by an “umnh, umnh,” which conveyed wordlessly the extremity of her disgust and sorrow.

  Then it started, the eyes closing, the head slowly, almost imperceptibly moving from side to side. As if she could bear it no more, she reached out her immaculate white-gloved hand and with her forefinger tapped my mother on the arm.

  The pillboxes came together and Gee-Gee put her lips to my mother’s ear, whispering indignantly: “Mrs. Kennedy is chewing GUM!”

  13

  Hamoo

  I had to learn many things about the South on my own. My parents tended not to speak in generalities about classes of people: they never disparaged poor mountain people as “white trash” or saw fit to mention the religious persuasions of local merchants. Early on, they became aware that seating the domestic help in the back of the car was a dated concept and, with much discomfort on all sides, convinced Gee-Gee to move up front. Over the decades they changed appropriately the terms they used to describe people of color: first “colored,” then “Negro,” and finally “Afro-American.” Neither lived long enough to ever feel comfortable with the relatively new nomenclature of “black.”

  So I suppose it should not strike me as odd that a black woman taught me that contact with a black man could be dangerous, although I was so self-centered that I thought her concern was mostly for me. Before that lesson, one August afternoon in 1966, I hadn’t really thought much about any of it. I had always seen, but not seen, black men on the fringes of white life, mowing, tending bar, or waiting for work in the shade of the big trees at the courthouse. There were a few black men who stood out as local characters: I remember silently cheering an insouciant Berkeley Hamilton as he drove a team of four horses along White Street. He was hauling a mountain of loose hay, whistling as he slapped the leathers and ignoring the increasing numbers of cars forced to drive through the droppings and dust he left in his wake. Even then, I think I sensed how dangerous his attitude was.

  I had regular contact with only one black man back then. We called him Hamoo, a sweet man with few teeth who was soft-spoken and a heavy drinker. He came to the house to help Gee-Gee with the more onerous household chores, although Gee-Gee made no secret of her disdain for his “trifling” ways. I had no idea what his real name was (I recently found out it was Sam Hamilton) and didn’t think it was strange that we called him by an appellation that might suit a cartoon character. Knowing black people only by their first names or nicknames back then was unremarkable. And conversely, the title “Miss” was always affixed to my first name when it crossed black lips, and, worse, “Master” often preceded my brothers’ names, irrespective of their ages.

  It was socially unacceptable to show deference to a black person. This lesson was taught to my Bostonian mother on her very first day in the South. In October 1939, my parents, married four days before in Braintree, Massachusetts, took the train to New Orleans, where my father had a job as a professor at Tulane Medical School. When they arrived, Daddy’s imposing Dallas socialite mother, Irma Dumas Munger, was standing on the station platform.

  Irma had grave misgivings when her much-beloved younger son announced he was marrying a Yankee she had never seen, evidenced by the telegram sent in reply to the news: “Slightly shocked… will arrive Sunday.” This announcement in the Dallas paper says it all:

  If Irma could have had her druthers, it would have been for a bride more on the order of the frilly one on the left, not the austerely modest one her son had chosen.

  Dressed to the Neiman Marcus nines and smoking a cigarette in an elaborately carved ivory holder, Irma dispensed with the preliminaries as the newlyweds disembarked. Brandishing the Times-Picayune’s real estate pages, she announced that in all of New Orleans there was only one apartment suitable for them, so she’d signed the lease and had a few important pieces moved in. Located on Jackson Square in one of the Pontalba Buildings, the apartment came with a full-time maid, Ophelia Payne, plus a laundress and cook, all black. Irma had them lined up like a military unit when my mother and father reached the landing on the second floor.

  Shaking each tentative hand, my mother greeted them using the proper honorific, “Good afternoon Mrs. Trask, Mrs. Payne, Miss Toutant.” She had hardly stepped past the reviewing line before Irma pulled her aside and said urgently, “Betty, you must use the first names!”

  Like most of the racial inequities she discovered in the South, my mother learned that this was just the way it was, stunningly unexamined.

  Gee-Gee came to work every day except Sunday, but my memory of Hamoo is that his days were unscheduled, or, rather, scheduled by his level of sobriety. His job was to wax the parquet floors and wash the great expanse of windows in our Frank Lloyd Wright knockoff house, hauling back the itchy fiberglass curtains while wobbling on the stepstool. With a little help from our liquor cabinet, where the level of each bottle was marked for reference by my father with black grease pencil, he always left a little drunker than he came, his smile broader than when we picked him up in what was then known as Mudtown.

  Lexington is a hilly town with a crease running lengthwise, north to south, all that remains of a once vigorous stream, now gone underground. In the absence of a railroad track, that geological anomaly offered the perfect racial divide. Mudtown began in the bottomland surrounding this shallow ravine, then rose eastward on the flanks of Diamond Hill, which gives this neighborhood the name that’s used today.

  On foggy mornings the coal smoke from the forge in Manly Brown’s blacksmith shop would mingle with the wood smoke of the cook stoves in Mudtown, then nestle impenetrably among the wooden houses. When my white-knuckled mother pointed the black Chevy down the hill to pick up Hamoo, all we could see were the brick chimneys above the fog and smoke. As we poked down into the murk, the cobwebs running between the hood ornament and the antennae became dotted with moisture that resembled tiny lights. Our car moved as soundlessly as a lit-up party boat seen through the fog on the Mississippi, and we looked out at dark faces in the doorways, hearing the muffled cracks of knee-broken kindling.

  Hamoo’s house appeared to have been built on stilts, its rear door opening out into a deep void. It was unpainted clapboard and had windows covered with brown paper in which dry goods had been wrapped. Devil’s shoestring sprawled in the yard, the gracefully arching branches brilliant with purple berries, and honeysuckle wound up the stilts. Approaching Hamoo’s house, I caught sight of a male figure standing in a rear doorway sending an impressive arc of steaming urine into the yard. Sunstruck, perfectly parabolic, he sent it forth with a slight upward tilt to his hips, not guiding or even watching where it went but instead dangling his hands to his side and raising his face to the faint sun.

  I knelt on the gray serge seat, my mother anxiously pumping the brakes, her left foot pressing the clutch to the floor while yanking on the column shifter. As we pulled to the front of Hamoo’s house, she rolled down the window, peered out, and honked the horn. The horn stuck, as car horns often did in those days, its insistent bray bouncing off the ceiling of mist and against the hills on both sides of us. Mudtown resounded with it.

  Children spilled from the doorways of homes so tiny that they appeared to be miniatures nestled in a crèchelike setting of cotton. They pushed through the screen doors, dragging bits of blanket behind them. Helpless and ashamed, I looked at them, and they stared back at me with eyes strangely serene as though informed by knowledge that precluded amazement.

  My mother was beating on the tilted black circle of the horn, shaking the knurled Bakelite wheel, then kicking up at the steering column, dislodging her stocking seam into a rucked-up zigzag at the back of her calf. When the noise began, she had stalled the car in third gear, which was not low enough to hold us completely, and every so often the car would
hitch itself forward toward the ditch with a reluctant, hiccupping motion. She appeared not to notice this, so preoccupied was she by the mutinous horn.

  From the fog between two houses a giant emerged. He was wearing an overcoat and pants held up by a belt whose excess hung down from a buckle off to the side. He pushed through the gawking children and, as he easily cleared a picket fence, revealed a foot which resembled nothing so much as a crudely swaddled newborn. When he reached the window he spoke soothingly to my mother, who appeared to be trying to yank the steering wheel from the floor.

  Reaching into the car, his hand enfolded the horn and gave it a twist. The braying stopped. In that sudden quiet the air seemed to collapse around us, like a gum bubble that pops across a freckled nose. My mother sat back on the seat with relief.

  That wasn’t the last time I was to see our white asses saved from automotive embarrassment, both times by a black man who accomplished his miraculous rescue in a similar way and with something resembling embarrassment.

  But… embarrassment for whom? For us?

  Yes, for us.

  14

  Smothers

  Winters of the 1960s were stormier than those we have now, and deep snows were not uncommon. We lived at the top of a long hill on a country road that, once it passed our driveway, led on past the small whitewashed home of the Smotherses, a black mother and grown son. A little farther along was a cluster of shacks where white people lived, the grown-ups drunk and the children, as often as not, albino. This road was not at the top of anyone’s plowing list, and sensible people out where we lived had chains ready to be spread out and fastened to tires at the first snowflake.