Sitting Up with the Dead, page 7
Iris Murdoch said that beauty “unselfs” us. “The sight of a bird, or a bank of sweet peas, or a lovely cloud formation,” she wrote, “breaks us out of our narrow egos.” She believed that anything that promotes “unselfing” is conducive to goodness, and that the best example is beauty. I bring this up because while some people are swept away by sweet peas and others by ankles and calves or particular shades of table linen, I am seduced by architecture. Beautiful houses encourage imitation. The harmony of design that makes them calm makes me want to be calm; their lack of rough edges makes me want to shed whatever ill emotion is pricking my skin like a stubble of thorns. Their sure lines guide my eye on a seamless journey up pilasters and over eaves, into corners, down staircases, through spaces dark and secret, light and open. Murdoch said this is the accomplishment of beauty, to lure the eye off the self. Stories do the same thing, and equally well; they, too, draw me out of the easychair of the ego and into motion along a route of words — calisthenics for the soul. Storytelling houses are the ultimate exercise.
“We have a ghost livin’ next door,” said Hattie, giving “door” a well-bred Southern “ah” at the end, rather than the West Country “r” most Americans chew on at the ends of their words. “McCooter is her name. She was murdered on the property. And she likes to drink. If you have a party and don’t leave a drink out for McCooter, she’ll knock the slats out of your bed … Sure enough, a new family moved in and didn’t know the story, had a housewarming party. That night, didn’t the slats fall right out of their bed!”
We left the front porch and its Egyptian Revival doorway — the Valley of Kings transposed into white clapboard — and entered a world decorated by the dead. “As a little boy I couldn’t wait to get new furniture,” said Dan. I had no sympathy. The front parlor was cavernous, swallowing up a crystal chandelier, several pieces of immense Empire furniture, a gilded floor-to-ceiling mirror, and a rare nineteenth-century piano. The carpet dated to the 1840s, purchased by an ancestor of Dan’s from a traveling peddler with a sewing machine.
“That’s my grandfather, John McHenry,” said Dan, pointing at a pastel portrait of three children from 1859.
“It was made while the family was taking the Grand Tour,” interrupted Hattie. She got up to show me John McHenry’s ancient passport. “See, it goes into great detail. Forehead: Full. Eyes: Light. Nose: Aquiline. Chin: Oval. Complexion: Dark. And then it says here, ‘Accompanied by Wife.’” She made a face.
“See, in the picture,” Dan pointed but didn’t look, “he’s wearing the uniform of the Georgia Military Institute. His whole class enlisted in the Confederate Army on March 20, 1864, when John was fifteen years old. He was put on sentry duty: his first post. It was dark, and he heard a rustling in the bushes. He hollered ‘Halt!’ but there was no answer. So he hollered again, but the noise just got louder. So he fired his musket at the noise, and he heard something drop. It was a pig. His only casualty in the Big War.”
“Now, see this picture,” Hattie showed me a hand-tinted photograph. “This is Laddie at seven, with his head on that little boy’s lap. Only the little boy was an old man by then. It was taken in the nursery upstairs.”
We moved into the entrance hall. It had been added in 1848 to what was once the outside of the house, in effect becoming the central hallway when another wing was built on the other side. One half of the house has closets, the other doesn’t.
“During the Big War,” began Hattie, “the town was occupied by Northern troops. One elderly man from Madison, Mistah Smith, was escorting two ladies downtown when they were accosted by a drunken Yankee. While trying to protect the ladies’ honor, Mr. Smith was shot and mortally wounded. He was brought here to die. See, he passed away right there, on the third step.” She patted a stair-tread and I instinctively spun the melodrama in my mind’s eye, giving it lots of blood and weeping.
“Another Yankee rode his horse up and down the hallway,” tisked Dan. “Ruined the black and white checkerboard floor.”
The depth and continuity of their knowledge stunned me. Generation upon generation, harboring the same memories in the same house, of a war fought on their doorstep, carried, even, into their front hallway: it was completely alien to my experience of the United States. Half my ancestors were peasants who would have been smarting under the thumb of the Austro-Hungarian Empire while the American Civil War was in full swing, and the other half, though probably in the States, are shadowy figures who lived out their lives in unknown locations. The intimacy of the Hickys’ relationship with the past — both the personal and the national past, intertwined into a breathtakingly accessible history — fascinated but gave me goose bumps at the same time. My reaction to their stories reminded me of staring dispassionately into a gaping hole in my leg after an accident, and thinking, how interesting, it looks like the pith of a carrot, even while alarmed that it was my own bone and flesh I was seeing. No wonder so many pilgrims to the South return with reports that the War Between the States, as Southerners call it, or better yet, The War for Southern Independence, lingers so vividly in the contemporary mind. In Confederates in the Attic, Tony Horowitz quoted an Oklahoma man working in North Carolina, as saying, “In school I remember learning that the Civil War ended a long time ago. Folks here don’t see it that way. They think it’s still halftime.”
We moved into another parlor where there was framed Confederate money on the wall, a tiny set of scales used to measure ore during the California Gold Rush, a silhouette of someone who had danced at General Lafayette’s ball, and a photograph of another ancestor who went down with the Titanic. Showing me an elegant little powder keg, Hattie, eyes glinting with wicked pleasure, said, “If our little mother-in-law [Zoe] were here, she’d say, ‘Dahlin’, I do apologize, but this is what we kept the gunpowder in when we were shootin’ at you.’”
The wonders continued. I saw Hattie’s grandmother’s wedding dress, with a waist just about the circumference of my upper thigh. I learned that glass used to be shipped rolled into cylinders to prevent it from breaking, then reheated to be stretched flat and cut (which is why there are so often bubbles in old glass); that Zoe’s mother’s name was Philoquia; that Hattie had a Yankee grandmother from Nashua, New Hampshire. I saw chests stuffed with muffs and boas and velvet hats from winters long past, and a desk of Georgia pine that had survived a fire in Arizona, the heat from which had resurrected long-dormant insects which woke, gnawed, and gave a fabulously ornate burling to the wood.
Hattie showed me the pink satin “Southern belle” dress she wears for summer tours. I asked if it had been specially made. She burst out laughing, glanced conspiratorially around, and whispered loudly, “Forty dollars, off the rack. It’s a prom dress, from the Juniors department!”
Dan wanted me to look at his poetry. One poem was about a dog, another a sensitive meditation on the sky from his perspective as a fighter pilot in World War II. As we pored over his work, Dan knowing by heart what he could no longer see, Hattie turned on the radio and began a kind of private, swaying dance, singing along to “Summertime” in a breathy alto. Then they wanted to take me out for fast food, but I was exhausted, and badly needed to make sense of my notes. Suddenly sad at the idea of leaving them alone in their beautiful temple, I ran to the car and fetched a crumpled bag of what Granny Griffin would have called sorry-lookin’ peaches that I’d bought earlier to give to Nancy Basket, and presented it instead to Dan and Hattie by way of thanks.
“He didn’t bore me. That’s why I married Laddie,” Hattie said as she saw me out. “It doesn’t do to be bored in life.”
The next day in the breakfast room of Madison’s Days Inn (set on a commercial strip a respectable distance from the historic downtown), I ate my Cheerios under an amateur watercolor of Rosehill. The contemporary painting imagined the house in pre—Civil War days, with several Uncle Remus—looking figures toiling — they were too picturesque to be merely working — in front. Yesterday, Dan Hicky had said that an old man, a former slave, had knocked on the door around the turn of the century and told his grandmother that the house used to have a balcony in the shape of a heart leading to a second story porch. The painting, however, portrayed mid-nineteenth-century Rosehill in its current incarnation, with a traditional porch stretched vertically across the façade. I felt smug for hours.
I also read a booklet Hattie had given me that she’d written about Madison — I was trying to avoid several elderly members of a bus tour who were holding bagels over their eyes like Lone Ranger masks — and learned two things: how to make “Georgia’s Coke-Cola [sic] Salad” (red Jell-O, crushed pineapple, Bing cherries, cream cheese, and “two cans Coke-a-Cola”), and that the former owner of Cyclorama had lived in Madison. This was big news.
A house near the Hickys’ called Luhurst — another monument of white-clapboard respectability, with a wraparound porch — had once been home, appropriately, to Lula Hurst, who had an amazing talent. She could levitate people and objects. Her most famous feat was to stand on cotton scales and, unaided, hoist two grown men in a chair over her head while the scales showed only her own weight. Her father contacted Paul Atkinson, who chaperoned the Battle of Atlanta cyclorama around the country along with other marvels, and arranged for Lula to join the act. Before long, however, Paul and Lula were married, and moved back to Luhurst to levitate no more.
The Kudzu’s Tale
ISTOPPED AMID THE BROAD-BACKED HILLS of North-eastern Georgia, not far from Walhalla, to get more peaches and a barbecued pork roll at a roadside shack that looked like it had been abandoned by a mobile flea market. The owner, squinting from beneath a battered Atlanta Braves cap, barked, “Girl, you got people in Georgia?”
I told him that close friends lived right over the Tennessee line, and he let it pass. “These here’re South Carolina peaches. Just so’s you know. Georgia peaches be runty right now.” So much for the plump peach on Georgia license plates. I also bought some scuppernong preserves because I liked the name. Vickie said that Daddy Runt had made wine from “scuplins’,” and I thought these might be the same thing (they were, but it took borrowing a dictionary to learn that scuppernongs are wild grapes, and scuplins’ one of Vickie’s family’s innumerable verbal shortcuts).
As the greenery rolled by I had the same curious feeling I’d had for days: that the South badly needed to comb its hair, metaphorically speaking. Mile after mile, the tree and shrubscape along the roadsides was hopelessly tangled in kudzu, the plant Time magazine had voted one of the worst ideas of the twentieth century. It was easy to see why. Kudzu is a leafy vine that was first introduced to the South from Japan in 1876, then promoted with gusto in the thirties, with the idea that it would prevent soil erosion and provide shade. The problem is, in optimum conditions — for instance, the climate of the American Southeast — kudzu grows up to a foot a day, and eventually smothers every object in its path. In seventy years it has crept everywhere, turning stands of mature trees into wild, giant topiary gardens. Imagine if Christo, the artist who wrapped the Reichstag in cloth, decided to cover the entire state of Georgia in very high pile green carpeting: it would look exactly like the work of kudzu.
I made up a sport called kudzu-spotting, which is similar to cloud-gazing, though earthbound. The dense green masses take on all kinds of shapes: bears, swooping eagles, several species of dinosaur, all leashed together like shaggy green circus animals. The idea is to spot them while driving at 70 mph without having an accident (I narrowly avoided two crashes that I can recall). Kudzu is so universally despised that it has become a sub-genre of Southern chitchat to bash it. Everybody hates kudzu … everybody except Nancy Basket. Nancy makes paper out of it. She told me on the phone that she’s also built a kudzu barn in her backyard.
“The leaves talk to me; they told me to use them,” Nancy said, sounding like she meant it.
Oh great, I thought, even the kudzu talks.
We were sitting in what I’d call Nancy’s Native American room, though her whole house may have been similarly decorated. I had arrived late, having been stuck on a two-lane highway behind a behemoth thresher, or some other ungodly large piece of farm equipment, and in my rush, hadn’t glanced at the rest of her house. An animal skin was thrown over the sofa on which we both sat, curled up on our respective feet, and her daughter’s Cherokee dancing outfit hung on the back of a door near an American flag, the latter superimposed with the image of a Native American man in full headdress. Antlers, feathers, animal skulls, and beaded necklaces were scattered along the mantlepiece of a large fieldstone fireplace. It was a comfortable room, earthy, with soft, overstuffed furniture — the very antithesis of Rosehill — and Nancy suited it. She wore her hair in a long black braid; bare feet poked out from under the hem of her denim skirt.
There were baskets everywhere.
“I’ll explain later why I went to the kudzu for help,” Nancy said. “But the baskets come first.”
Nancy had been born in Washington State, but moved to South Carolina ten years ago after learning how to weave and braid baskets in the early eighties. Shortly after her apprenticeship, a great-uncle had contacted her out of the blue, sending hitherto unknown information about her third—great grandmother, Margaret Basket, a Cherokee basket weaver who had been born in Virginia. Margaret had been one of thousands of Cherokee forced westward along the Trail of Tears, after white settlers drove them from their homes. (I thought uneasily of Rosehill. Hattie Hicky had told me the day before that one of the branches of the Trail of Tears had passed just in front of the house; it later became the Charleston-to-New Orleans stagecoach route. “We ran the Indians out of heah,” she’d stated, characteristically telescoping past and present with her free use of pronouns.)
“When a young Native American woman shows promise as a basket maker,” Nancy continued, “out of respect she takes the name of the ancestor who’s helped her in her art.” Which is why, encouraged by her uncle’s intervention and a timely divorce, she became Nancy Basket.
The stories grew out of her basketry. After she got to Walhalla, Nancy continued her apprenticeship with Native American artists in Cherokee, North Carolina, just across the state line. “They told me stories as we worked. Native people believe that there are stories in the landscape. Stories in mute things, in objects, like baskets.” Nancy had a rhythmic way of speaking, soothing but with muscular emphasis, as if she were kneading her words the way bakers knead dough. “They also believe that stories have medicine. That stories find you when you need them. And if you become a storyteller, it’s a sacred responsibility. You have to give your audience the medicine you think they need.”
I wondered what medicine I would get, as I sipped a Diet Dr. Pepper. Now, she continued, she worked as an artist-inresidence in the South Carolina school system, traveling and teaching Native American culture, basketry, and papermaking, and telling stories. “I tell the children about the drowning of Cherokee towns for reservoirs. There are some of us,” she was almost whispering now, “who can still hear the drums sounding underwater.”
Half-hypnotized by her delivery, I was jerked wide awake by this last bit of information. In Wales, my touchstone for oppressed nations, Welsh-speaking villages had also been submerged — recently, in the 1960s — by reservoirs created so that towns in England could access water more cheaply. Instead of drums, Welsh nationalists claimed to hear chapel bells tolling underwater. I told Nancy this and she nodded solemnly. “Yes,” she said, “I see you understand.” Then she excused herself and ran out to drive her reluctant teenage daughter to work at McDonald’s.
These missing places, drowned, or decimated like Rosewood, take revenge in ghost stories of phantom drums, and long-dead children crying in the bottoms of wells. Landscapes do hold stories, only sometimes they are so old, or the victims of violence were so powerless, that the tales become dislodged, and the “hauntings” that began as collective conscience, a community remembering, get swept up into the dominant, collective conscious as folktales of ghosts. I heard eerie stories, usually in pubs in North Wales, about church bells ringing under the sea long before I ever learned about the Tryweryn Reservoir. I wondered how many spooky tales contained an ember of subversion at their core — a protest of the vanished, pushed from the margins all the way off the page — that smolders there either to be ignored or bellowed into flames according to the teller. Everything depends not so much on the tale, but on who tells it.
One of the original feminist manifestos, aptly titled Diving Deep and Surfacing, by Carol P. Christ, makes the succinct point that those who tell the stories wield the power. “Women,” she wrote, “live in a world where women’s stories rarely have been told from their own perspectives.” Carol Christ wasn’t the first, of course, to point out the power of storytelling in shaping knowledge, especially in relation to women trapped in men’s narratives:
“On women … the clergy will not paint, Except when writing of a woman-saint, But never good of other women, though. Who called the lion savage? Do you know? By God, if women had but written stories Like those the clergy keep in oratories, More had been written of man’s wickedness Than all the sons of Adam could redress.”
This wonderful diatribe was delivered by the Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Her admonition, and Christ’s — for the characters to seize control of the narrative — applies to all marginal-dominant relationships, as Nancy well understood. It was her particular goal to wrest control of the storyscape from the settlers, so to speak, and return it to the Cherokee.
