by Sally Mann
But not my daddy. Although he was one of only four physicians in the county and the only night he would not have to rise from bed and drive, sometimes for an hour or more, to a patient’s house was every third Wednesday, he was still loath to put chains on his beautiful, zabaglione-yellow Studebaker. This modern, aerodynamic model looked the same both front and back—a slightly reptilian snout, backswept loins, and a tapering flank. It looked fast, and was, too.
But not with chains on.
One afternoon, Daddy picked me up early from Brownie Scouts because of the snow rapidly accumulating, and we headed toward home. With the long hill looming whitely ahead, Daddy instructed me to hold tight to the strap that looped from the headliner at the window. I grabbed it with both hands, and he gunned the Studebaker. Swinging into the oncoming lane, he cut the sharp corner at the base of the hill. The telephone pole whizzed by so close I jerked my hands free and ducked.
Wildly spinning the wheel, he corrected the drift, downshifted with a deft heel/toe, and then floored it up the hill. The nose of the Studebaker shoveled up plumes of snow, which blocked our vision as we roared into oblivion. But despite, or perhaps because of, the accelerator being jammed to the metal floorboards, the rear end began a series of gracefully diminishing fishtails, and we subsided into stasis. The snow gentled around us, restoring our sightline: two-thirds of the hill rose pristinely before us.
Then, slowly, the Studebaker began to slide backwards and sideways, my father futilely pumping the brake until both side wheels settled languidly but emphatically in the ditch. With a sigh, Daddy reached into the backseat, mated up the two worn handles on his black leather medical bag, and swung it onto the tilted front seat, where it slid down against my hip. I collected my book bag and scooted uphill toward his side of the car.
He pushed open his door, propping it with his foot, while I ducked under the wheel clutching my brown beanie to my head. Once I was out, I held the heavy door for Daddy, then let it slam, the weight of it seeming to sink the car more deeply into the ditch. But before we could start to trudge up the hill, the sound of clanking chains drifted up to us, and, with it, the distinctive, rancid smell of rotting trash. No mistaking that stench. We smelled it every Saturday when Smothers came to collect whatever trash we hadn’t burned in our stone incinerator the week before.
I am sure Smothers had a first name; I knew his mother’s was Betty, because she was the maid at the house of a friend of mine. But Smothers was always just Smothers. He and Betty kept pigs, so he gathered up the trash around town, sorted out the paper, glass, and metal, then fed the pigs everything remotely edible. His yard reeked, and his truck did, too.
We heard the gears shift down to first at the telephone pole, and the old truck began chugging its way up the hill, the smell getting stronger. As it drew alongside us, Smothers slowed, and the steady drip of liquid from under the tailgate now began to pour out, steaming and rank. The passenger-side window was jerkily rolled down, and the blue-black face of Smothers appeared.
“Mr. Smothers!” My father said cheerily, as though surprised to discover who it was.
“Doctor Munger,” was all Smothers said, rolling up the window and pulling the truck past us and off to the side, where the snow began to melt in a line below the tailgate. Then Smothers loomed out of the snow. He was dressed in a dark coverall with knee-high black boots. Smothers smelled like rancid compost, too.
Daddy and I were fully snow-covered by this time, his bald head protected by a felt hat that he briefly tipped in welcome. Then, sensing Smothers’ discomfort, he shook it to get the snow off, as though this was the intention all along, and replaced it. My galoshes rose above the thin Brownie socks with the dancing fairy on the cuff, but they were no match for the snow, which was drifting in around my ankles. I looked warily at the rivulets of brown liquid headed toward us, then at my freezing feet. Smothers had walked to the car and was dusting snow off the bumper.
“We’ll just do the front,” he matter-of-factly announced to my father, politely pluralizing the concept. And with that, he lifted the entire front of the Studebaker out of the ditch and back into the road. Returning to his truck, he fetched a chain, hooked the car to the truck, and told us to get back in. We resumed our seats, Daddy somewhat comically holding the wheel in the ten-two position. The steady clanking of chains and the slushing of our bare tires through the mixture of snow and compost runoff were the only sounds as we achieved the crest of the hill and our driveway just past it.
Twenty years later, on my way home after a weekend at the cabin, I stopped by a small grocery near my house, and in the parking lot was Smothers’ truck, as noisome as ever. But Smothers himself, standing by the counter with a six-pack casually overtaken by his hand, was clean, smelling of Aqua Velva, and dressed up. His pants were a dark polyester check, he was wearing a yellow shirt, and his belt and shoes were a cracked white plastic material. Off to the side stood two white men, one a gelatinous pile of unintended self-mockery, the other stubby-fingered and wearing logger’s boots. They did nothing to disguise their contempt for Smothers, snickering, glancing at the white shoes and the knee-bagging pants.
A bell on the door had sounded as I entered, and after it quieted I spoke to Smothers, whose eyes were fixed on the floor. Even after I spoke, he seemed reluctant to meet my gaze. Pressing the point, I stepped up to him, and for the briefest moment his expression brightened, then veiled over with an obvious attempt to spare me the embarrassment of knowing him. I took the cue and walked over to the coolers.
As Smothers dug into his pocket and uncrumpled his bills on the countertop, Stubby Finger stepped aggressively close to him, wedging the crenulated edges of his Dr Pepper bottle cap into the opener under the lip of the counter. As he pulled, the cap and a splash of sugary liquid dropped onto the white shoe below.
Smothers reached into his pocket, retrieved a folded handkerchief, and wiped his shoe. Then he stepped to the exit, turning to meet my eyes with a heartrending look of apology, and gently opened the tinkling door. I never saw him again. He died of a brain tumor several years later, his body wasted, in his aged mother’s care. Even though I know it isn’t likely under the circumstances, I see a pietà when I think of it.
15
The Kid on the Road
Driving back into Lexington from our neighboring town one August afternoon in 1966, I saw ahead of me on the side of U.S. Route 60 a dark, broken figure with a distinct hitch in his gitalong. Squinting against the afternoon sun, I tried to make sense of this jerky apparition that somehow reminded me of a sooty Tin Man. As I approached, it coalesced into a pointy-hatted black teenager with one crutch supporting the side of his body that had never grown and another dragging behind for balance.
I drove by him, then pulled to the side and hollered out a casual-sounding offer of a ride. His hat hid his face but everything about him bespoke indecision. I said, “C’mon, just hop in,” instantly regretting the choice of verb, but relieved to see that he had begun lurching forward, shooting a backward glance. He came to the passenger side and got in the backseat. When he had settled the crutches, I pulled onto the road.
We drove in silence for a time, and then I asked where he was headed, which was Lexington, six miles east. Trying to sound as natural as possible, as though he were a boarding school kid like me out looking for posters for the new dorm room, I began asking questions about his family, where he grew up, and what he had been doing for the summer. When he said his family name, I knew it, or at least I had heard the name from Gee-Gee, and I was pretty sure I could find the street where he lived.
But on the outskirts of town he asked to be dropped off. I pulled over in a parking lot and got out to help, but he was well into it on his own and appeared to be in a hurry. He thanked me, turned away from my pleased face, and hitched away toward town. Since it was right there, I stopped by the Clover Creamery for a caramel milkshake before I drove home. As I came down the drive, through the steamy kitchen windows I could see Gee-Gee
preparing dinner.
Her specialty was fried chicken. Each week a freshly killed bird was delivered to us by a neighbor, who required a shot from the marked bourbon bottle in the sideboard to sustain him as he made his delivery rounds. Gee-Gee would singe the pinfeathers while the wrung neck and head of the chicken drooped out of her fist like a failed bouquet, and then cut it into the usual pieces. Maybe it was the fresh meat or maybe it was the depth of the hot oil or the seasonings in which she dipped it, but her fried chicken was so sublime that as we ate it we failed to notice the oil-splatter burns that peppered her arms or the sweat stain that spread across her uniform while the exhaust fan roared ineffectually above the stove.
She was about to cook chicken and biscuits when I got home that afternoon. I strolled into the narrow, hot kitchen, noisily sucking up the last of the milkshake and kicking off my Bass Weejuns.
“So,” I announced, “I picked up this crippled kid on Route 60 today and gave him a ride to town… you know, Ernestine’s nephew.”
I went on, and Gee-Gee was listening, but then she was turning her body toward me with an ominous heaviness, as if a Henry Moore sculpture were being rotated 180 degrees. She had biscuit dough stuck to her hands, but above those hands was that wide face, shiny with sweat and… was it anger? Anger, at me?
No, perhaps it was fear but there was also anger, and it was taking over her features in a way I had never seen before.
With her hands in the air, the way a surgeon holds them to push the paddle faucets when he is prepped for action, she pressed me back against the wall with her floury forearms, and said in a voice I’d never heard, low and afraid, “Don’t you ever pick up a colored boy again, no matter what, no matter who. You hear me?”
Despite having been so affected as a child by stories of Emmett Till’s murder, it was many years before I realized that it was unclear just which of us Gee-Gee was most worried about.
16
Who Wants to Talk About Slavery?
The memories sketched in the preceding chapters provide a few of my personal points of reference for what the legal scholar Sanford Levinson calls “the brooding omnipresence of American history—race and, more precisely, slavery.” No doubt about it, history is a big deal down here; but still, even among the competitive crowd of southern states, Virginia stands out in its obsession with the past. Somehow, though, we have neatly managed to elide out of our revisionist historical picture that latter clause, the “race and, more precisely, slavery” one, preferring not to acknowledge the abiding human spirit of slavery.
Physically, the reminders are everywhere. Prominent among them are some of Virginia’s most iconic structures, from Jefferson’s slave-built rotunda at the University of Virginia, where one of our daughters studied, to the slave-built colonnade of Washington and Lee University, which our other daughter attended. Of course, many Virginians choose not to be reminded of slavery and instead express their appreciation of the past in a Civil War–reenacting, R. E. Lee birthday–celebrating, Confederate flag–waving sort of way. Indeed, in 2010, Republican Governor Bob McDonnell contrived to announce the beginning of Confederate History Month with a formal declaration that omitted any reference whatsoever to slavery. This paradoxical refusal to own up to the horrors of slavery while glorifying the past of which it was a crucial element indelibly blots our ledger book and complicates the often dishonest narrative of our country’s history.
The first slave ship to these shores unburdened her cargo in Virginia, and thereafter our majestic James River was compelled to carry the grievous burden of our country’s slave traffic. No Southern state exceeded Virginia in slave ownership or slave trade: our soils were tilled, swamps drained, timber and minerals extracted, and our roads, cities, and universities built by the sweat of black backs.
The idea that Virginia stands in some kind of special historical and symbolic relation to American slavery has been discussed and debated ever since the 1975 publication of Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom. For Morgan, Virginia history offered a microcosm of what he called “the central paradox of American history”: the simultaneous rise and mutual reinforcement of American liberty and of slavery.
The success of slavery as an economic system in the United States depended upon the divisive effects of institutionalized racism, which other forms of slavery historically did not. Slaves were certainly mistreated throughout history, but however cruel the practice of slavery was in other societies, it did not rest on ideological racism to the extent its North American counterpart did. Morgan argued that our singular American racism was not a natural disposition carried across the Atlantic along with steel weapons and smallpox but rather a pragmatic attitude that had evolved as a way of preserving the stability of colonial society.
The greatest threat to that stability was thought to lie in the possible recognition of common interests between poor whites and slaves. To prevent such a nightmare alliance from taking shape, the law, the pulpit, and the press joined forces to deepen the perceived differences between the races by convincing white colonists that they were naturally superior; that they, whatever their social rank, were, as Morgan put it, “equal in not being slaves.” As a cynically encouraged moral disease, racism has had regrettable staying power and, no matter how we deny it, is still employed as a subtle but potent political and psychological tool.
This racist legacy of slavery was said by Faulkner to be a curse on the entire South, white and black, the wounds of African Americans mirrored in our guilty white souls. Reading “The Bear” under my tented covers, way past Putney’s “lights out” hour, I began to understand that he was right. “Don’t you see?” he wrote. “Don’t you see? This whole land, the whole South, is cursed, and all of us who derive from it, whom it ever suckled, white and black both, lie under the curse.”
Now, some forty-five years later, the same Hudson’s Bay blanket on the bed, here I am doing my best to visually articulate my sense of the unsettled accounts left to us by that brooding curse.
The first picture I took of a black man was easy.
That’s the way it sometimes goes for me: I start on a new series of pictures and right away, in some kind of perverse bait-and-switch, I get a good one. This freak of a good picture inevitably inspires a cocky confidence, making me think this new project will be a stroll in the park. But, then, after sometimes two or three more good ones, the next dozen are duds, and that cavalier stroll becomes an uphill slog. It isn’t long before I have to take a breather, having reached the first significant plateau of doubt and lightweight despair. The voice of that despair suggests seducingly to me that I should give it up, that I’m a phony, that I’ve made all the good pictures I’m ever going to, and I have nothing more worth saying.
That voice is easy to believe, and, as photographer and essayist (and my early mentor) Ted Orland has noted, it leaves me with only two choices: I can resume the slog and take more pictures, thereby risking further failure and despair, or I can guarantee failure and despair by not making more pictures. It’s essentially a decision between uncertainty and certainty and, curiously, uncertainty is the comforting choice.
So I soldier on, taking one dodo of a picture after another, enticed by just enough promising ones to keep going. Soon I encounter another obstacle: the new work, so precarious, unformed, and tender, is being subverted by my old work, which was itself once precarious, unformed, and tender but with the passage of time has now taken on a dignified air of inevitability. The new work has none of that apparent effortlessness, the after-the-fact infallibility that the old work so confidently glories in. No, the new work is always intractable, breech-presented, mulishly stubborn, and near impossible to man-haul into existence.
Eventually, the law of averages takes pity on me, as it is known to do for my fellow sufferer, the monkey at his typewriter, and doles out a miracle: a good new picture, at last. It brings me relief and reassurance, but no one else sees it for the milestone it is. Each time, friends and family
dismiss my panic and despair, saying breezily, “Oh knock it off, you’ll get another good picture, you always do. Relax!”
“Relax,” I snort sarcastically to myself, shouldering the tripod to take another picture that is certain to be vapid, derivative, unhingingly bad. “Sure, you know all about it.” How can they understand the paralyzing, dry-well fear I live with from one good picture to the impossible next? Who can know the agony of tamped-down hope between the shutter’s release and the image in the developer? Or the reckless joy when I realize that, at last, I have a good one; eagerly, my ebbing confidence throws off the winding-sheet and resumes business at the old headquarters, a wondrous resurrection.
But, of course, it is also a fleeting one. It lasts about as long as the exquisite apex of a wave and, just as the wave takes the sand castle, it sucks my confidence out with it as it recedes. In its wake, it leaves the freshly exposed reminder that, however good that last image was, the next picture must be better. Each good new picture always holds despair within it, for it raises the ante for the ones that follow.
Every time it’s the same. It’s easy to prove to myself that good pictures are elusive, but I can never quite believe they’re also inevitable. It would be a lot easier for me to believe they were if I also believed that they came as the result of my obvious talent, that I was extraordinary in some way. Artists go out of their way to reinforce the perception that good art is made by singular people, people with an exceptional gift. But I don’t believe I am that exceptional, so what is this that I’m making?
Ordinary art is what I am making. I am a regular person doggedly making ordinary art. But as Ted Orland and David Bayles point out in their book Art and Fear, “ordinary art” is the art that most of us, those of us not Proust or Mozart, actually make. If Proust-like genius were the prerequisite for art, then statistically speaking very little of it would exist. Art is seldom the result of true genius; rather, it is the product of hard work and skills learned and tenaciously practiced by regular people. In my case, I practice my skills despite repeated failures and self-doubt so profound it can masquerade outwardly as conceit. It’s not heroic in any way. To the contrary, it’s plodding, obdurate effort. I make bad picture after bad picture week after week until the relief comes: the good new picture that offers benediction.