Читать книгу In Love with Defeat - H. Brandt Ayers - Страница 12

We were innocents, focused on the pleasures of the present. It was pleasant on Glenwood Terrace, a street divided by a grassy median, which supported a line of antique streetlights marching six blocks up to Tenth Street Mountain. Our house was the fourth on the south side of the median, number 818, the only one sitting on two corner lots. Glenwood Terrace was and is a premiere address in Anniston, but I didn’t know it at the time. Even if I had, we were taught that it is pretentious (a cardinal sin) to say so. My family was part of what passed for aristocracy in a small town, though we didn’t put on any airs. That “wasn’t done.” Besides, you couldn’t get away with such affectations in a small town.

Had there been a social register in Anniston, though, Mother and Dad would have been listed. Mother was an athletic, beautiful, and talented woman, star of the Little Theater and a state doubles tennis champion. From childhood, she had pulled a whole caravan of Norwegian maiden names—Edel Olga Leonora Ytterboe—that embarrassed her when she had to recite them before a first-grade class in the Minnesota college town of Northfield. Her father, Halvor Tykerssen Ytterboe, whom I knew only as a lithe, athletic-looking man in the portrait hanging in our dining room, played football for the University of Iowa and was a founder of St. Olaf College, as well as a popular professor and playing coach of the baseball team. His unsmiling face in the portrait and photographs concealed a playful nature. In letters he was sure chickens were calling Mother’s name “Edel, Edel Edel.” In another, he teased his wife, “Just got up and feel that I love you still. I don’t see how I can with all your faults—but it seems I can’t help it.” St. Olaf’s original mission was to acclimate Norwegian immigrants to the new American society without discarding all of their original culture. The young athletic professor, whose fund-raising had helped save the college, undertook even menial duties. One was fumigating the boy’s dorm with formaldehyde after an epidemic of scarlet fever. The fumes poisoned him and, cheerful and playful to the end, he died at forty-six. Mother, who worshipped him, was six years old.

Years later in New York at graduate school, she accepted a fateful invitation to venture South from a classmate in the Columbia University School of Education. Young Edel Ytterboe’s Southern friend was another pretty athlete, Palmer Daugette, whose father, Dr. Clarence W. Daugette, was president of the State Normal School in Jacksonville, ten miles north of Anniston. The two girls taught physical education that summer of 1921, when Edel met the Colonel . . . by accident of a coin flip.

Colonel Harry Mel Ayers, my father, was already a substantial man in Calhoun County and the state of Alabama, whose military title was awarded for service on the staff of his best friend, Governor Thomas E. Kilby, former president and CEO of Anniston’s Kilby Steel. Dad owned a daily newspaper, the Anniston Star, and had managed Kilby’s winning gubernatorial campaign. For his time and place, he was also a worldly man. He had lived and traveled in Asia with his father, Dr. Thomas Wilburn Ayers, one of the first Southern Baptist medical missionaries to China (1901–26). By Dad’s own estimate, he was far short of handsome: a slight man of medium height with sloping shoulders, receding hairline, and a substantial nose rudely sculpted on the football field of then Jacksonville Normal School, but bright and intellectually inquiring. His manly charm made him a popular and natural leader who would dazzle young Edel Ytterboe in their first lengthy and close encounter, which was by chance. Dad had lost a coin flip and had to drive the ten-mile, washboard dirt road to Jacksonville to pick up Edel and Palmer for a Rotary Club picnic. A dance number performed by Edel and the Daugette girls, Kathleen and Palmer, entertained the Rotarians and guests. The thirty-six-year-old publisher followed the moves of the blonde Nordic beauty and he fell, hard.

Their whirlwind romance was climaxed by an anti-climatic automobile journey to Minnesota by Dad and several of his friends, all expecting to bring home his bride. When the Alabamians entered a Minneapolis hotel in their seersucker suits and straw hats, it was as if there had been an aboriginal invasion of Scandinavia. The room clerk, curiosity mingling with alarm, asked, “What are you . . . Baptists?” No, the ecumenical delegation answered, worse . . . “We’re Democrats.” When the squad of exotic strangers reached thoroughly Lutheran and Republican Northfield, they and Dad were met with deep skepticism. The president of St. Olaf, Lars Boe, grilled Dad for hours and sent forth a blizzard of telegrams inquiring about the character of this alien being from the deepest, snake-infested jungles of Alabama. A crestfallen Colonel returned home sans bride. Shortly after, when President Boe’s telegrams yielded nothing but affirmative reviews of Dad’s character and history, the odd couple—or so it seemed to Minnesota Lutheran eyes—was wed on September 28, 1921 at Northfield’s St. John’s Lutheran Church.

The Star’s legendary society editor, Miss Iva Cook, whose story reached for, and almost went, over the top, reported the affair. She described the wedding as “a very notable event, which has been the occasion of much interest throughout Alabama, where the groom is well-known and prominent.” The bride was “very charming and accomplished, possessing many social graces, which will make her a lovely addition to Anniston society.” If Miss Iva said it, then it must be so, for she was the social tyrant of northeast Alabama. She chose and dictated the size and display of the bridal pictures each Sunday. If your daughter was not one of the three large pictures at the top of the page, then your family dined below the salt or at the second table. If your daughter’s picture was in the center, elevated slightly above the other two, then you were the pinnacle of Anniston society. Typical of Miss Iva’s imperious touch was her account of a garden party hosted by Mrs. Kilby, wife of the former governor. In almost sensual detail, Miss Iva described the day, the garden, the texture and make of the tablecloth, the silver, the food, and the medley of colorful frocks, and then listed some of the guests by name, concluding . . . “and several others.” Mother made the list, but imagine the distress of local matrons awakening to discover that Miss Iva had assigned them to an anonymous social purgatory of “several others.”

Those grown-up social nuances meant nothing to us local boys. We were no more aware of such distinctions than we were of the huge and omnipresent structure of segregation which, to us, was normality, the way things were, always had been, and always would be. The adult obsession with race was invisible to my buddies and me. I heard few telltale signs at the dinner table of the torturous grip the issue had on Dad or about his courageous and conflicted struggle to balance his belief in educational, economic, and political equality for blacks—within a segregated system.

We knew about the custom that reserved the back of city buses for Negroes, but we violated that taboo frequently, happily commandeering the prized long seat in the very back of the usually empty bus on Saturday afternoons. Saturday’s ritual was as permanent and predictable as the order of service at any of the town’s six jillion churches. The bus stopped at the main downtown intersection of 10th and Noble streets, where the elegant old Opera House had become the Noble Theater, venue for Roy Rogers cowboy movies and Batman serials. Riveted by the good-guy, shoot-em-up action of Roy and his horse Trigger, and by Batman’s weekly escapes from near death, we did not notice that the once-elegant Opera House, where Shakespeare had been performed, was now a derelict old lady, her velvet dirty, her ceiling murals caked with dust, her gilt cracked—genteel poverty at its most abject, vulnerable to the cocky, tasteless New South real estate economy soon to destroy her. She would be dismantled to make room for a furniture store—later closed. But in boyhood days, the Noble was the first of four downtown theaters with the Cameo, the Calhoun and the Ritz, one-to-a-block that lined the west side of Noble Street.

All are now erased, but then the Noble was the branch-head of the stream of ceremonial Saturdays in the happy, opaque, all-white world where we grew up. Every Saturday, as we exited the cooler darkness of the un-air-conditioned Noble Theater into the bright humidity of Noble Street, we speculated excitedly about Batman’s fate. Then we might get a cherry Coke at Wikles or Scarborough drug stores, but a necessary part of the ritual was to walk the two blocks up tenth Street to view the treasures of Carnegie Library. The library then housed the Regar Collection, beautifully mounted native birds in their natural habitat. A favorite was the steely-eyed eagle, its noble head capped in white, perched high on a limestone outcropping. In its claw was a lamb, a realistic drop of blood on the little animal’s white fur. Next, we mounted the stairs to the balcony to stare at the case with the Ptolemaic Period mummy, its colored wrapping faded by the centuries. But underneath, we knew, was the deadness—a dark, scary concept, beyond our imagination or experience. We regarded the dead Egyptian woman with silent respect.

There was one delicious year during construction of Memorial Hospital that the walk home took us by irresistible cliffs and valleys of red dirt. On dry days, conditions were just right for painless dirt-ball combat. Painless because the red clods crumbled when they struck. The year of the great mud-ball civil war, however, was real combat, with real casualties. The eastside was divided into two rival armies of boys, one defending in the woods above Governor Kilby’s house. When the invaders approached our roofless log fort, commanded by the governor’s grandson, George Kilby, I at first threw mud balls fearlessly—until one struck me in the chest. From that moment on, I was a cautious soldier. The battle was a formless affair, boys running through the woods tossing and ducking mud balls with high anxiety, as if there were real danger. Our side caught and briefly imprisoned a few invaders in the pool house but there were no real victors or losers; just boys excited by imagining we were real soldiers.

Casualties of similar skirmishes today might still face the unpleasantness of the Saturday bath, but their battle-soiled clothes would be dropped in the washing machine. Back then, dirty clothes were collected and taken to Jensie’s house in the Southside colored neighborhood. In her backyard was a giant black iron pot where the clothes were boiled (perhaps, I imagined, while Jensie uttered black-magic incantations as she stirred). Within the week, they would reappear, starched and folded in a wicker basket and giving off a neutral scent, the smell of clean. Jensie’s house was one of the stops on the Christmas delivery route, too. Mother insisted I deliver her present personally, which I did awkwardly, not knowing what to say to an older person who was owed respect but who also had to endure the humiliation of washing other people’s clothes. She always greeted me warmly, with self-confidence rooted in the belief that the service she performed was not demeaning but a way to make a few extra dollars.

A real war came to us mud-war veterans on the radio with the shocking news that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. The most immediate and visible sign of threat to me was Dad on Civil Patrol with a World War I helmet a size too small and a flashlight as long as my six-year-old torso. The blackout—shades lowered and no outside lights—lasted only a few days. Adults concluded that the Japanese weren’t going to bomb Anniston. Ritual summer Saturdays and the winter walks to Woodstock School, hated corduroy knickers marking time—swish, swish, swish, swish, swish—rolled on with little sense that people were actually killing each other way over there in Europe and Asia, wherever those distant galaxies were. One summer during the war, when I had been sent off to Camp Yananoka in North Carolina, Mother committed a famous malapropism. Chatting cheerily on the phone with a friend, she said, “Oh, yes, Brandy’s having a wonderful time—canoeing, riding horseback. Where? Okinawa.” The friend was puzzled and horrified.

Those great and terrible years when the world was on fire, when American heroes were white knights in khaki pushing back the evil hordes, Nazis and Japs, are compressed in child-time. The war years are a cadenza of memories: my victory garden that yielded only radishes, war bonds in Christmas stockings, “America the Beautiful” sung joyously off-key in the Woodstock School cafetorium; Mother playing “There’ll Always Be an England” with anthem solemnity on the baby grand in our living room; the “essential occupation” gas rationing stamps on Dad’s Chevrolet; playing French Resistance fighters with George in the fields behind the governor’s house; pictures I drew of P-50 Mustangs with grinning shark’s teeth on their noses and of GIs mowing down Nazis. All these and the Movietone newsreels narrated by a doomsday bass are the ways a boy remembered a war that didn’t touch his family directly—minutia interrupted by two dramatic jolts and the first smack of cynicism to adolescent idealism.

The first shock came when Marian Huey and I were doing something that might have earned us a spanking if we’d been caught. We’d sneaked into Mr. Acker’s car to listen to music on the radio—not to deliberately run down his battery, but that could well have been the result, which would have brought with it the consequence favored in that time. Those were the days when spanking was as American and Southern as fried chicken on Sundays. Marian usually had it a little worse than I did judging from the sounds of her yells and her mother’s smacks ringing from the pre-air conditioning open windows at the corner of Glenwood and Highland. Mother gave me a few light lickings and Dad’s one performance was a bit comical as he searched for a hairbrush that had not been used for its original purpose in decades. On this occasion, however, it wasn’t corporal but God’s punishment we got. We had scarcely taxed Mr. Acker’s battery when the music was interrupted to announce . . . president roosevelt is dead! It was as devastating as if a parent had died. He had literally been father to the country, the only national father we children had known, who drew even Dad and Mother to the sound of his voice coming from Dad’s old shortwave radio by his red leather chair in the library.

Less than four months later, I was at my good friend Lloyd Brinkley’s house across the alley, a second home, when the second surprise shook our world. Lloyd’s father, Bill Brinkley, was managing editor of the Star and, because of our dads’ occupations, Lloyd and I had passes to all the Anniston Rams home baseball games. We were allowed to climb the wooden ladder, straight up on top of the bleachers, and lie on our stomachs right under the radio booth and behind the screen, where we would involuntarily reach for an occasional foul ball inches away. Heedless of our station as children of privilege in that all-white cocoon long ago, from our perch under the WHMA announcers, we were fascinated by “Cotton” Hill’s curve balls and hump-backed sinkers.

Evidently, Lloyd’s dad made just enough at the Star—about $100 a week—to support his wife, Ida Lee, two sons and a daughter. The Brinkley kitchen did not have a refrigerator. It had an icebox, whose top compartment held a block of ice, delivered weekly by a muscular man wielding a large pair of iron tongs. There was a wide income and power gap between the two families that the adults understood but that had no meaning to their pre-teenaged children. I looked up to Lloyd, a year older and adolescent handsome, with slicked-back dark hair, whom the girls called “Id’n” (for idn’t he cute. I would have done anything short of treason to be called “Id’n.”) Mrs. Brinkley seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of sandwiches for Lloyd and me, the boss’s son. It was on her screened back porch one morning in early August when the voice on the ubiquitous radio announced in sepulchral tones that a “device” of indescribable destructive force had been dropped on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. (Many years later pictures in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum portrayed for me the instant of horror and the piteous aftereffects, but outside, when I found that a sports bar occupied ground zero, the museum’s gloom was lifted.)

Three days later, August 9, a second “device” was dropped on Nagasaki, and within a week of the introduction of atomic warfare by the United States, World War II was over. When V-J Day was announced, my older sister, Elise, was home. She was to me, eleven years her junior, a wondrous being who lived away from us in Tuscaloosa, a romantic place of such Wagnerian heroes as Harry Gilmer, the All-American halfback for the Alabama “Crimson Tide.” She would be a senior at the University that fall. She and a contemporary, Anne Gambrell McCarty, decided to drive downtown to observe the spontaneous celebrations of V-J Day. In the front seat, I was happily wedged between actual college girls. Downtown we saw a good deal less than a Times Square celebration: happy people greeting each other on the sidewalk, and some honking of horns. Anne Gambrell viewed the scene unsmiling, and deflated my sense of celebration when she said the strangest thing: “The war’s over; the breadlines start tomorrow.” Her cynicism, uttered with quiet but impressive certainty, was strange to my ears, like nothing I had heard at home. Her worldview was foreign to her place and time. Anne was a liberal, a real left-winger for whom the flaws and evils of our “way of life” were more obvious and detestable than the gracious speech and manners with which they were camouflaged. She would later get in trouble in Louisville for the mortal sin of helping an African American couple buy a house in a white neighborhood—prima-facie evidence of communism in those days. Neither she nor I suspected at the time that one day I, too, would be branded a liberal and our family newspaper derisively called, principally by racists, “The RED Star.”

In 1945, downtown was just as it had always been. Hidden economic forces—wheels within wheels within wheels—had not yet engaged to signal the economic takeoff point of the Southern economy, marking its long-delayed recovery from the Civil War. Not yet risen were the winds of social change that would turn “our way of life” upside down. On Noble Street, stood the magical kingdoms, Kress’s and Woolworth’s five-and-dime stores. The warm parfait of scents from the candy counter tantalized children as they entered Kress’s to shop for Halloween masks and hats or inexpensive Christmas presents for friends and teachers. Of course, there were also the twin, hospital-white drinking fountains, one marked “White” and the other “Colored.” The wife of an Air Force officer, Rosalie Reynolds, was home on leave in the early 1950s from Germany where her seven-year-old son, “Studie,” had been born. She took the boy shopping at Sears and Roebuck, the fabulous, large store at 17th and Noble. Studie confronted one of the drinking fountains for the first time, and he was charmed. “Look, Momma,” he said excitedly. “They’ve got colored water!”

It was just such innocent discoveries that made my generation aware of the parallel universe where “colored” lived behind a barrier that read, “Do Not Enter.” I was about twelve when I first noticed the barrier as an inconvenience. I was buying a ticket at the Calhoun Theater simultaneously with a boy who’d played touch football in our unselfconscious, interracial games. He was on the other side of the glass ticket box. Inside, I waited for him to come in, but there was no door. It was then I understood why there was a red velvet rope blocking the stairs to the balcony.

Thoughts of social justice did not disturb the pleasant sameness of growing up at 818 Glenwood Terrace in the 1940s. We had rituals as perfect and predictable as Saturday afternoons at the movies. Dinner, cooked by Mildred and served by Eli, was at 6:30 sharp, when conversation was suspended to hear the radio commentary of Quincy Howe from Boston. Then Mother and Dad would discuss the events of the day. Countless times Dad punctuated the discussion with favorite quotes. “Noblesse Oblige, to whom much is given, much is expected.” “Duty is the sublimest word in the English language, quoth Robert E. Lee.” “He who fails to take heed of events far away will soon find trouble near at hand.” Whether or not those aphorisms were meant to instruct his children, they stuck with me and helped shape my view of the world.

Sunday dinner, served after church, was always fried chicken—a Mildred specialty: juicy meat covered with a golden brown crust. Often during the war, soldiers would be at the table, knights in khaki. In those days, before air-conditioning, the house was always dark in summer and the basement fan perpetually stirred the moist air. On rare occasions, Stephen Foster melodies would float from outside through the closed blinds into the dining room. The family would leave the table and assemble on the front porch to enjoy the serenade by a trio of black musicians who did not ask for but received a gratuity from our parents. The sound carried on the humid Alabama air was sweet; the memory is sad. They were the last troubadours of a dying civilization—a society with a rotten legal core but which had its charms.

Dad’s words may have been more memorable, but Mother was at the center of family life, planning meals, birthday parties, grown-up parties, and family vacations. Perversely, every August just as the hurricane season started our family headed for the Ponte Vedra Beach Resort and Club in Florida (welcomed “home” by the familiar staff). Mother was the producer and stage-manager of a series of birthday parties at which I, as guest of honor, got the prime slice of chocolate cake, “the chicken coup,” so-called because it was a corner piece with icing on two sides as well as the top. The calorie and cholesterol content could have measured in megatons. One birthday, she organized a midget baseball game at which she pitched and our then-butler-chauffeur-gardener, George Hillman, was the catcher. Bushes obscured the whole scene from neighbors across the street—except for the pitcher and catcher—and next day our across-the-street neighbor, Mrs. Miller, called to ask Mother if she enjoyed her game of catch with Hillman.

Christmas was Mother’s pièce de résistance, the beating heart of family ceremony. Christmas was also a celebration of community life. Before the boom times down South, before suburban sprawl brought us developments with names nearly as pompous as “Grande Dame Estates,” before malls and multiplex theaters, Noble was the main street. Crowded with Christmas shoppers, the vital pulse of commerce beat from Gus “Nick” Nichopolous’s community-central Sanitary Cafe to the Commercial National Bank presided over by big, friendly Marcus Howze and quiet, sweet-natured Guice Potter Sr. We even had our own Lilliputian Macy’s Day Parade. Children wedged and squeezed through the forest of adult legs to get close to the grand progression of high school bands, including the high-stepping Cobb High (black) entourage, capped by the appearance of a magnificent Santa—sowing the fields of spectators with wrapped candies, children grabbing at them in the air and scurrying to rescue fallen pieces.

At home, Mother’s much-anticipated production began with the ritual gathering of the smilax, which meant a perilous ascent of an extension ladder to clip the vines from trellises on the side of the house. Smilax was a main feature of Mother’s decorations. Lush garlands snaked up the banisters of the hall stairway and were draped over all the pictures, including the flat likeness of Grandfather, his white VanDyke beard above white tie and tails that set off three colorful medals awarded by Chinese presidents for his public health contributions to that poor nation—objects of awe, envy, and mystery to me. His picture was faced by a lovely portrait of Mother, painted by cousin Ted Mohn, hanging above the fireplace mantel on the opposite wall of the living room. The two paintings were silent witness to the ritual Christmas Eve. The perfect, undeviating sameness of those evenings, with their constant moral core, took on an almost sacramental quality. The evening began with a scratchy 78-rpm recording of Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” starring British actor Basil Rathbone as Scrooge. Its undisguised message—the evils of greed and the joys of charity—were taken seriously by our family and we never failed to be moved when Tiny Tim piped, “God bless us, every one!”

Next in the order of service came family carols, an uncertain chorus of Dad, Elise, and me, accompanied on the piano by Mother, who, as the family musician, played with firm confidence. The only flaw in the ceremonial reenactment was the perfectly awful Christmas Eve dinner of backbone—a fat, greasy, barely edible black mass whose roots in tradition are lost, a tradition to be honored in the breach. Because there was no strong pull of anticipation associated with that meal, the family listened with patient appreciation as Dad found the Second Chapter of Luke, beginning with: “And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus . . .

“And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room in the inn . . . And there were, in the same country, shepherds abiding in the field, . . . And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were sore afraid.”

The majestic language of the original King James translation awakens a cluster of powerful feelings of home, family, happy times during the delightful irresponsibility of childhood. Modern versions, which substitute “strips of cloth” for the magical “swaddling clothes” and the shepherds were “frightened” for “sore afraid,” trigger no emotion but regret. Mystery has been robbed to achieve a too-familiar accessibility. Important traditions are not improved by modern-day tinkering. It’s the faith of my father, King James, for me, and I never found any version of Dickens’s classic quite as satisfying as those old, scratchy recordings. I can’t explain why those Christmas Eves rank in my memory above the exquisite torture of the following morning’s anticipation—Dad’s interminable breakfast—which kept us from the treasures under the tree in the library.

Nostalgia plays funny tricks but it must know what it is doing. Its authority cannot be disputed

Turning twelve and entering sixth grade was a milestone. It meant leaving the familiar habitat of Woodstock School. My all-white grammar school was a place of happy memories, minor disappointments, and one great crime. Heroism and celebrity were near-misses in those years. I had a chance to score a touchdown during recess tackle football games—a signal achievement for a slow, chubby boy who was not a favorite receiver—but Jimmy Hannon’s bullet hit me in the mouth and I dropped the ball. Neither did I get the coveted appointment as captain of the Safety Patrol—the white cap and belt with the silver and blue badge—opening car doors as they delivered children at school and, grandly stopping tenth Street traffic for students crossing. I was merely fire chief, with a red cap and belt and red-rimmed badge.

Woodstock was also the setting for my brief and inept criminal career. The summer after graduation from Woodstock, Tommy Butler, Ronnie Hicks, and I were camping out in an army tent in the side yard. We relieved the boredom by egging neighbors’ houses—not very cleverly leaving my house untouched. Next, we targeted the school. We crouched behind a row of hedges separating the west side of the building from a rocky, unpaved alley where ammunition was plentiful, smooth throwing stones. Among the most delicious moments of childhood is that instant after launch when you wait to hear if your missile hit brick—or, ahhhhh, glass! Bold and invisible in the dark, we moved closer, concentrating fire on the office of the feared principal, Miss Meigs. She used switches on malefactors and always held a handkerchief in her hand—to cover a missing finger, clear evidence of sinister doings. Suddenly, a light flashed around the north side of the school. Like two dumb, frightened deer—one skinny, the other chubby—Tommy and I fled due south, up a rise where, at the front of the school, we were stabbed by a constellation of lights. We froze, while Ronnie smartly veered off to the west and escaped. The cops took Tommy and me to the station and put us in a cell while they made the fateful calls to our parents. Elise was at home and described the scene. Mother took the call, heard the news, and dramatically held the phone out to Dad, “Harry, your son is in prison!” Dad’s recommendation was to leave me there, which meant the police had to take me home. Among the physical and financial punishments that resulted was an audience with the Mayor Himself, the Honorable Ed Banks. Worse, Dad ordered our misdeeds exposed in the paper, which meant everybody in town, peeking through their blinds, spied Public Enemy Number One as he trudged remorsefully around town, bent under the weight of Cain’s crimes.

Sweeter memories of Woodstock begin at the beginning, when I fell in love with my first-grade teacher, Margaret Griffis. Miss Griffis was also our “Miss Manners,” teaching children the distinction between “excuse me” and “I beg your pardon.” “Excuse me,” is appropriate for a trivial offense such as brushing against someone. But for serious breaches of etiquette (her example, knocking a lady’s sable coat to the floor) “I beg your pardon,” is required—as in begging clemency from a king. She was not out of touch with the seamier side of life, but viewed it with droll worldliness. When a prostitute claimed a candidate for lieutenant governor had tied her up and done unspeakable things with her, Miss Griffis observed, “If that gul did all of the things she is supposed to have done, Ah think she sold herself too cheaply.”

My feelings for her didn’t achieve closure until the fall of 1998, when the still-slim and still-beautiful Margaret, in a white silk dress and spiked heels, had a birthday party. For herself. To celebrate her ninetieth birthday. In my toast, I invited the guests to go back with me fifty years and look in on Miss Griffis’s first grade class. The children were bent to their task—copying the alphabet, making vowels with great oval swoops—all but one boy. So smitten was he by the beauty of his teacher, he could do little but stare. That Christmas, his mother suggested cologne for the teacher. The boy protested, “Mother, that’s not good enough for Miss Griffis. We should give her an evening dress.” The mother prevailed, of course. I was that little boy, and the oversight so many Christmases ago had been a burden on my conscience—until her party—where, to her delighted astonishment, I whipped out a fire-engine-red sequined number. With tassels. Would she wear it? A friend asked her that and she gave a revealing reply, “Oh, it’s much too tight.”

She died in 2006, an original and, in our informal, unceremonial contemporary society, an unrepeatable heirloom—with just a dash of flirtatious devilment.

Inevitably, the day came when all twelve-year-old boys and girls were launched from their grammar schools and met in a war of the planets: eastside vs. westside, Venus vs. Mars. We were all white, but we had been formed by life into two separate and incompatible worlds. We eastsiders had been coddled and sheltered by the more spacious incomes of our parents. The westside kids had been toughened, made streetwise by growing up in blue-collar neighborhoods. One of the friendlier westside girls shocked me with an admission that seemed commonplace to her. The family would take Sunday sightseeing drives to Glenwood Terrace and other neighborhoods on my side of town: to see how the “rich” people lived.

Not all the westside boys were friendly. One of the tough ones roared back to life for me in the summer of 2000 when the Atlanta Braves’ ace reliever, John Rocker, launched some wild verbal pitches, sounding off about New York’s “foreigners,” “queers,” and welfare mothers. Rocker was for me a junior-high terror come to life. I recognized in him the feral breed. He drove a battered pickup on reckless Saturday nights up to and over the edge of danger. In his blood, a six-pack mingled with the genes of wild Celtic ancestors. He was a descendant of fearless Highland warriors, Irish rebels, Viking plunderers and lonely Southern pioneers pushing back the wilderness in solitary sorties—a familiar Southern type, a redneck. Anybody who grew up in the small-town South knows a John Rocker. I first met him in junior high school where boys from the “right” side of the tracks merged with their scary classmates from the “other” side. He was the tallest, most muscular, and scariest of them all. He knew the unprintable names of certain parts of the female anatomy and spoke them in a way that suggested he might actually have explored those secret, unattainable kingdoms. He was an object of fear and admiration.

In the universe of junior high and high school, he was Braveheart, with a mean streak, whom no paddling principal could tame and bring to heel. His independence was crafted by earlier generations that, in contrast with the westward exploration of Easterners in communal wagon trains, wrested the land from the wilderness as lonely, single pioneers. W. J. Cash in his classic Mind of the South wrote, “He had much in common with the half-wild Scotch and Irish clansmen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries whose blood he so often shared . . .” A history he didn’t know or understand formed the John Rocker of my junior high: athlete, lover, king of his adolescent universe.

From an unlikely source, former United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young, came a tolerant understanding of how a small-town Southern tough felt on being stranded in an alien land—the sophisticated, urban, multi-ethnic planet upon which he had landed. When the two met, Young knew what it was like for Rocker to have exploded from a Macon neighborhood onto the national stage. In so many words, Young said that Rocker was an innocent country boy who had never been anywhere or met anybody who was different. A baffling world came at him, and he balked. “Besides,” Ambassador Young added, “Yankees are different.” True enough, as he illustrated with an ironic anecdote: years ago, a rude New York merchant had sent his wife from a store in tears when, in the segregated South, Young said, a shop owner would have treated her with courtesy.

The year, 1949, was a kind of educational “phony war” for me. It was to be my freshman year at Anniston High School, but the day for registration, buying schoolbooks, and the first day of classes all passed without any command from Mother and Dad about school. What I didn’t know, and only vaguely suspected from taking a battery of tests none of my friends did, was that a decision had been taken from on high—long before family conferences came into vogue. I was being sent away, to a small Episcopal boarding school near the then-grimy manufacturing town of Danbury, Connecticut. Mother and Dad decided on the Wooster School, because the “name” schools such as Andover and Lawrenceville would have to put me back a year or two. Anniston schools evidently weren’t up to speed. Wooster would take a chance, because I had a detectable IQ pulse and because my family liked the values Wooster put up front in its catalogue: “Religion, Simplicity, Intellectual Excellence and Hard Work.”

The announcement of my fate was duly made and I awaited banishment with trepidation. Elise tried to calm my fears, without success. Finally, the day came for Dad and me to board the train for New York. In Manhattan, dressed in my favorite powder blue suit and whitebuck loafers, we went to Brooks Brothers to buy weird, pinched, dull, gray and blue suits and a gray jacket made of little Vs. I was outfitted as a proper preppie, and I hated the look. Dad took me to school, where we met the friendly headmaster, the Reverend John D. Verdery, and finally the dreaded moment came when Dad left me alone on the stone walk leading up to the New Building. It was a gray, cold September day in the foothills of the Berkshires—just right for a sense of desolate abandonment.

Before the mood could overtake me, however, a couple of older boys greeted me, one wearing a white sweater with a maroon “W”—a figure of awe to a third former. The older boys were kind, and I soon discovered that Wooster was a friendly, special place, a formative experience in my life. The student pool was not as old-money, first-family New England as Groton under its fabled Rector, Endicott Peabody, but it bore a resemblance to the model he cast. “If some Groton boys do not enter public life and do something for our land,” intoned the Rector, “it will not be because they have not been urged.” The handsome young headmaster of Wooster, John Verdery, was not so formidable as Peabody and his masters did not preach public service so didactically. Wooster did not hide its values, but it wasn’t grim about them. Without trivializing either school, Wooster was Groton Lite. The style of the place and what I took from it are summarized in the citation that was given to me as the Alumnus of the Year for 1998 [see Appendix].

The citation’s style fit the place: just short of jaunty, no strained praise or funereal solemnity, an honest, not terribly impressed salute to a life that, on balance, had been above-average okay. It was read in the school’s spare, old chapel where, in my speech I acknowledged the presence of so many friendly ghosts . . .

One was John Verdery, who preached there every Sunday, but whose manly, understated grace was a more lasting model than any of his sermons. His wife, Sue, whose slightly scatter-brained charm, good looks, and mastery of French cooking made their house a warm haven as a student and for years afterward. Babysitting their children gave me a feeling of family far from my real home. In my senior year it also got me close to their nurse, the full-lipped, shapely Mitzi Henz, the only girl our age on campus, which made me the envy of the class.

Another was Joe Grover, who tried to bring order to my chaotic essays. Still another was the rumpled “Mr. Chips” of my years there, Donald Schwartz, whose all-day final exam in the combined American history and literature class asked us to use our readings to respond to William Faulkner’s Nobel Acceptance Speech that year, “man will not only endure, he will prevail.”

I don’t recall if after the award and speech in 1998 I looked deliberately at the spot outside West Cottage remembering how the Head had queried me about a pending Supreme Court decision that I knew nothing about, but surely I must have. If I had I would have shaken my head in wonder that I left Wooster completely innocent of the thunderclap that would shake the South in the second semester of my freshman year at the University of Alabama.