by Pat Conroy
• • •
Another memory comes to mind, when Carol Ann was five years old, and the last of the Nolen family came to pay their respects to Stanny for the loss of her husband. The visit took on a nightmarish aspect when one of Stanny’s second or third cousins started telling stories, mostly about himself. When displeased, Stanny’s eyes could assume a hooded, cobra look, while my mother’s eyes could turn a biting blue.
The cousin was a vintage Southern boy of that era, strong and willowy, sporting a blond crew cut so sharp that it looked like it could cut your finger. He fascinated me because I’d never seen a man so young take over the conversation from his elders. Then he told a story that is fabled in our family mythology, yet firmly and resolutely denied. He told about going to a Klan meeting outside of Jacksonville, Alabama, when the group he was riding with spotted a five-year-old “nigger boy” playing alongside the road. As a joke, they picked the boy up to give him a joyride, but the little boy screamed in terror. Some of the men wanted to drop him off. Instead, the driver accelerated his car to a hundred miles an hour and threw the boy off a high bluff located somewhere between the two towns.
“We felt like we’d done a pretty good night’s work for the Klan,” he said, his smugness filling the room.
Then we heard it, the keening, the primitive call of inconsolable women, and turned to see it coming from Carol Ann. It began low-pitched, then rose in fury and register until finally she approached the unstrung cousin with her finger pointing straight at him: “Evil. You are evil—get out of this house. Get out right now.”
I didn’t know what the word “evil” meant until I heard it raw and nasty coming from my sister’s lips.
The cousin said, “Ain’t anybody gonna whup her? She deserves to be whupped. I’ll be glad to do it.”
“You touch my daughter and I’ll cut your heart out,” my mother said coldly. “Now, you leave and go back to what brought you.”
“Never come calling at my door again,” Stanny said. “I don’t know a damn one of you, and I sure as hell ain’t gonna correct that. Git. Go on down the driveway.”
“Make them leave our house,” Carol Ann moaned, the ancestral moan still putting her fury in parentheses.
“We heard you were strange, Margaret,” a girl cousin said.
“Not strange enough for that part of the South,” Stanny answered, and that accursed branch of the cousinry slouched down the driveway.
I thought my sister Carol Ann was the bravest, most admirable person on earth. But how did she know all of this when she was so young? The story of Carol Ann facing down a family Klansman burned like a brand into my brain. Even then, I marked the moment when she packed a wallop of social courage I always lacked. Wordless, I’d watched the exchange with knee-knocking terror.
Afterward, I was so shaken up that Mom and Stanny explained to us that the boy was just a bigmouthed braggart and that was how some white boys in the rural South got their kicks—boasting about the killing of colored people. Even Stanny wouldn’t explain how she was related to the crew-cut guy, and we never heard him mentioned again.
“Call the cops,” Carol Ann demanded.
Stanny took time to explain: “Even if that boy did what he said, no white jury would convict him for killing a colored person.”
“We’re raising you in an evil land,” my mother said. “But we’re not raising you to be like him.” And she never again took us to Piedmont, Alabama, during our childhood.
Later, however, Carol Ann would enter dangerous waters with my mother every time she opened her mouth. Now I know what Mom was expecting in a Southern daughter: a darling girl with an adorable laugh and a love for jewelry and girlie clothes. She wanted a conventional, presentable girl who would one day attend cotillions and debutante balls with a retinue of young men begging for a place on her dance card.
My sister was nothing like the daughter my mother dreamed of when she appeared on March 10, 1947. Mom raised Carol Ann and me to be writers, failing to take in the strangeness of poets and the long gestation period required of novelists. Every time my sister spoke her mind, she generated a savage reaction in my mother. At an early age, I got the distinct impression that there was something about Carol Ann that both my parents hated. With odd skills of articulation, she spoke truths her parents were not interested in hearing.
But the enmity between my mother and sister was growing malignant as I entered eighth grade at Blessed Sacrament School in Alexandria, Virginia. After we returned home from school, Mom would begin picking away at Carol Ann on everything from her appearance to her posture. Instead of just letting those criticisms go, my sister would fire back wounding volleys of her own, and a no-holds-barred mother-daughter catfight would break out. Prisoners were never taken and wounds were never cauterized. The words flashed like razors and the fight would move upstairs, where Carol Ann and I had pine-paneled bedrooms of our own. Retreating to my bedroom, I would close the door, but the waterworks of their personal fury battered against my walls like waves. They brought the ferocity of leopards to their howling encounters.
“Young lady,” Mom said, “what does it feel like to know everything in the world?”
“Better than being you—knowing nothing,” Carol Ann said. “You didn’t even go to college.”
Wham! I heard a broom whistle through the air, a new weapon my mother brought to the art of warfare against her voluble daughter.
“I hope that made you feel good, Mother. Hitting a ten-year-old in the face with a broom.”
“Just shut up. You always have to have the last word. I promise you this, young lady: You won’t have the last word today.”
“If that makes you feel better, Mother,” Carol Ann said, raising the ante.
The broom whistled again and hit my sister. Carol Ann was not one to suffer in silence. She screamed as though she’d had a breast removed by a cutlass, a signal that I should enter the fray. All three of us had memorized all the steps of the macabre dance many years ago.
“Oh, the golden boy has arrived. Hello, Mr. Sunshine. I was so hoping you would make your heroic entrance before Mom beat me to death with her broom,” Carol Ann mocked.
Bam! Mom swung the broom again and caught Carol Ann hard on the chin, eliciting the same animal cry of hurt as before. I grabbed the broom and twisted it out of Mom’s hands.
“No broom, Mom,” I pleaded. “Please just ignore her.”
“I won’t let her get the last word in!” Mom screamed. “So help me God, I’ll beat her to death with my fists if I have to.”
“I think that’s a very fair thing to ask, Mother,” Carol Ann said.
Mom lunged for Carol Ann with her fists flying, but I grabbed her from behind. “Carol, just shut the hell up and I’ll take Mom downstairs.”
“Gosh, Mother, it must be so nice for you to have the normal son, the adored one. It’s a shame he’s as stupid as you are. Hell, you’re reading Edna Ferber and acting like she’s Jane Austen.”
Again, Mom charged and caught a hunk of Carol Ann’s brown hair. She would’ve pulled it out if I’d not been there to loosen her grip. “Now, I want you to shut up and let Mom get downstairs before you can say a word,” I cried.
“Have you ever noticed that you’re not king of the world?” my sister declared.
My mother returned armed with the broom and almost brought Carol Ann to the floor with a well-aimed sock to the back of the head. Again, I fought the broom away from Mom, this time throwing it down the stairway. When I returned to the field of battle, Mom had Carol Ann in a stranglehold and had fought her to the floor.
“You seem to love being cruel, Mother,” my sister said, “just like the beast you married.”
“Shut up! Shut up! You’ll not have the last word today, even if I have to knock every single tooth out of your head!”
I picked my sister off the floor, then covered her mouth with my hand. Limber and strong, she fought me and spit on my hand as I yelled for Mom to make her escape.
“Ha! I got the last word,” Mom said in triumph as she ran downstairs. Carol Ann would’ve tried to take my fingers off if I had not released her fast and pushed her toward the window. Quickly, she spun and challenged me, spitting in my face and trying to claw my eyes out of their sockets. Finally, exhausted, we both sank to the linoleum, breathing hard.
Finally I said, “Who the hell is Jane Austen?”
“Poor idiot golden boy. You’ve got nothing written all over you. You try to make these idiots like you, but they never will. I’ll hate you forever for holding my mouth shut. Can you spell ‘forever,’ golden one? Altar boy asshole.”
Though the change was a slow one, it had an inevitability about it. My parents were drawing me slowly into their enemy camp, where I became Carol Ann’s chief interpreter and the vilest traitor she would ever invite beside her council fires.
So I grew up with this unripened mind, a sister who sounded like a teenager trapped in a child’s body. In a chrysalis of words, a poet was growing up beside me; because of her infinite curiosity I walked through the ruby mine of her consciousness as she made jewelry from the language she and I shared.
I had once thought Carol Ann and I were as close as any siblings could get. Her mind delighted me in all its trailblazing discoveries. When Dad served his first tour in Vietnam, I was a sophomore at The Citadel and came home that Easter to a continuing civil war between Carol Ann and my mother. Again, the broom was the weapon of choice.
Early in the evening hours, I awoke to a screaming physical fight that I had come to expect at The Citadel when two men clashed over a girl.
I rushed into the TV room, where I saw the broom bash against the side of Carol Ann’s head.
“You might beat me to death, Mother,” Carol Ann said, “but it’ll only make me much more famous among female writers who know about the martyrs in their midst.”
“I’d like to make you a goddamn martyr tonight, you little bitch!” Mom screamed.
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
“Oh, go back upstairs and clean a sword or something,” Carol Ann sneered. “You do know they sent you to the worst college on earth. It doesn’t have a literary reputation because it doesn’t have a reputation at all. You’ll go to Vietnam and die in the paddies with boys with the lowest IQs.”
“Let me beat her to death, Pat. You’re just wasting time.”
“What’s this fight about?” I asked.
“I’m watching a British play to the end. I’ve become an actor this year,” Carol Ann said.
“She’s got a nothing part in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town—nothing to write home about,” Mom said.
“Then you need your sleep, Carol Ann,” I said, walking over to turn off the TV.
“You ever turn that TV off again while I’m watching it, I’ll turn you into fish food for the next day,” Carol Ann said.
I intercepted Mom’s next baseball-bat swing of her broom.
“Carol Ann, I don’t want to have to kill you,” I said, “But it would actually feel good, the way you’re acting.”
“Oh, son of Don, progeny of Zeus, chattel maker of women, since I’m a girl, I’m just roach dung in the field for the golden issue of Apollo. Though he acts like a sun god, Pat is a war god and Carol Ann is his immortal enemy. I’ll bring you down with my poetry. My art will put you into your grave. You’ll write for Hallmark cards.”
I always cherished these moments when my sister made her long-winded mythological and psychological attacks on my character. I found them erudite, hilarious, and perfectly close to the mark. Though I knew I dealt with a chickenhearted assimilation in my dealings with adults, I never saw the wisdom in alienating them to the core, as Carol Ann was so apt to do. I liked it when Mom kissed me rather than putting me to the floor with a broom. It was Carol Ann’s belief that an artist had to be a rebel in constant war with the world around her. She would bring the world to its knees with her poetry, and I would make them kneel at the communion rail with the shit I wrote. When we were kids and all the way through college, Carol Ann Conroy and I were locked together in a two-step dance to survive the windchill factor of our parents’ marriage. For twenty-five years, we kept up a running commentary on the hopelessness of our situation in fashioning some kind of normal life from the ruins of the Conroys’ undermined hermitage.
Early and often we remarked about the real damage our parents had inflicted on us and wondered drearily about the fates of our younger brothers and sisters. To us, Peg and Don did not appear to grow more facile with the art of parenting as they aged. When we left home for college, it seemed like an escape from the pages of a blighted hymnal. Though I hated the plebe year at The Citadel, I also believe that Carol Ann caught some sickness of her lonely spirit in her first six months of Winthrop, but neither of us gave serious thought to returning to that scene of breakage that had produced us. Not that our folks would welcome us home. When a Conroy kid went off to college, there was no bed to come home to, no chest of drawers or a closet, or bathroom privileges, or even a place at the dinner table. You had to squeeze your way in, find how the house worked without your participation, and hope for a mattress on a basement floor to sleep on. College became not only our new home, but also our destiny. There was no such thing as looking back.
Of all the people I’ve ever talked to about literature and books, Carol Ann was the most insightful. She possessed a natural gift for summation and a broad-minded affection for other writers’ work. We grew up believing both of us would be writers. At the time, I didn’t think we had any reasonable chance to succeed at this ambition, since our education was sketchy and run-of-the-mill. There were long odds against us, but neither of us cared, and both were innocent in the extreme.
The break between us was gradual, but I now believe inevitable. When Carol Ann was in college, she made a bold move by announcing to the family that she was a lesbian. It was the summer of 1969, when Dad was in Vietnam, and Carol Ann came to Beaufort with her roommate from Winthrop, Chris Cinque. I’d never spent any time with her friend Chris, but Carol Ann had written great letters about her steadfastness, charm, and reserve. She had stated that Chris Cinque was the perfect roommate for her.
At the request of my mother, Carol Ann had come down for the weekend so the happy Conroy family could pose for a group photograph for my father’s camp desk in Vietnam. After dinner Carol Ann made her disruptive but colorful move. She charged into the kitchen with her blue eyes flashing her desire to take center stage, with Chris trailing like a fledging bird behind her. Carol Ann cried out, “I have an announcement to make.” All eyes in the room turned to her as she stood there, her booted feet set solidly on kitchen tiles and her face filled with righteousness.
“I am a lesbian!” she shouted. “I am a bull dyke.”
My mother hurled herself around, undone like I’d never seen her before. Then she began chanting, “I knew it. I knew it all along. I knew from the morning she was born. Something was off. I couldn’t put my finger on it. I couldn’t name it. But she’s always been off. Now I’ll never have grandchildren. I wanted so much to have grandchildren.”
As I helped my mother to her feet, I said to her, “Just look around, Mom—you’ve got three grandchildren looking at you.”
“I’m proud to be a lesbian, Mother!” Carol Ann said, still in shouting mode. “I’m proud to be a bull dyke. I’ll shout it from the rooftops, from the highest trees.”
“Subtly done, Carol Ann,” I said as I helped Mom into a kitchen chair.
“I’m declaring who I am. It’s important to me that all of you accept me as a beloved sister and as a lesbian.”
In complete innocence, my mother looked at pretty Chris Cinque and asked, “Is Chris a lesbian, too?”
This brought Chris and Carol Ann to the point of collapse, and they held each other as their laughter reached hysteric proportions.
I felt a tug at my fingertips and I looked down to see little Jessica and her puzzled face beneath me.
“Daddy,” Jessica asked, “what is a dyke?”
“Jesus God,” I moaned, and then said, “Let me think about this for a sec. A dyke. Yes. It’s coming to me. Got it. You know that story I read to you girls? The one about that brave little Dutch boy who put his finger in the dike? Well, Carol does that. She runs around and finds holes in dikes and dams and holds her finger in them.” Then I turned to Barbara to ask, “Don’t you think it’s time to put the girls to bed?”
“Oh, no,” Barbara said, “I wouldn’t miss this show for anything.”
Stanny jumped in and said, “You aren’t a lesbian, Carol Ann. I’ve sailed around the world five times and I can guarantee you’re not a lesbian. I’m worldly, you know.”
“Are you calling me a liar, Stanny?” Carol Ann said. “I thought you, as a gallant woman, would accept this with the love and courage it requires. In the South, I’ll have very few people supporting me in the racist, lesbian-hating world that surrounds me. But you? The great traveler in our family, who has been everywhere and done everything? You’ve been the great experiencer of the family, the voyager, the Odysseus traveling for years to get back home. If you fail me, where will I turn?”
“Don’t know, but you aren’t close to being a lesbian,” Stanny said with maddening certainty.
My mother said, “Can’t we change the subject? It’s getting rather boring.”
Again Carol Ann lit up like a Roman candle and exploded. “My sexuality is boring? Do you realize you’re putting a stake in my heart by saying something that stupid and insensitive? Look at me. I’m your daughter. The hated, tormented first daughter. See me, Mother. For the first time in your life, please try to see me.”
“I see you, I see you,” Mom said. “So now will you shut up?”
“No, I won’t, Mother. No one shall muzzle me or silence me again. I’ve come out of the closet and into the streets. For the first time I’ve come into the light, and I love the light and I’ll never be hurled into darkness again.”
“She’s the farthest thing from a lesbian I’ve ever seen,” Stanny continued. “She’s not even close.”