Читать книгу Sitting Up With the Dead: A Storied Journey Through the American South - Pamela Petro - Страница 11
Оглавление‘EVERYBODY THINKS I’M A PENTECOSTAL, but I’m not, I’ve just got long hair.’
This last word came out sounding like hi-yar. Vickie Vedder was a striking woman in her early forties, tall, softly athletic, with an easy smile and what could only be called tresses of long dark hair. With her good looks went an accent that you could grow fat listening to, sweet and sticky-worded ear toffee. My own voice sounded brutally utilitarian by comparison.
I had met Vickie on the Internet, and she’d invited me to her home in Forsyth, Georgia, before she had stopped to consider whether I might be an axe-murderess. Later she told me she had been worried.
Forsyth is in Georgia red clay country, where the earth swells and bucks under the farmland. When exposed it is the color of raw beef; and on dry days, like this one, a haze hovers above the roadsides like rusty fog.
Vickie lived outside town in one of the quiet places I had been fretting about missing on the Interstate. To reach it I drove along a secondary road past woods and fields until I came to her signpost: an old barn half-consumed by trees. It would have had the look of a Dutch landscape etching but for the corrugated iron roof, which was painted with enormous letters that read, ‘See Beautiful Rock City.’ Or, as Vickie had warned, ‘See Beautif Rock Cit,’ because some of the iron slats had recently fallen off. Rock City is a kind of giant-scale rock garden in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Barns all over the South once advertised it, though Vickie’s is now one of the few that remain, making it a legitimate Southern icon.
Her farmhouse and out-buildings artfully married wrought and found, decay and care, in a way that suggested a relaxed appreciation of the visual world. Vickie kicked at the red dirt and said that the difference between ‘home’ – Wilkinson County, not far to the south – and ‘here’ – Monroe County, where her husband was from – was that the earth in Wilkinson County was white and chalky. ‘This,’ she said, scuffling it again with her foot, ‘is just red dirt.’
Vickie’s house was nicely cluttered, but her ‘office’, which was really a nook just wide enough to stand sideways in, looked more like an experiment in sedimentary rock formation than any part of an ordinary household. Her desk and bookshelves were barely visible, overlain by strata of photographs, trinkets and souvenirs, scattered overtop with scribbled notes and sheets of paper. The effect was of a secular altar, which it may very well have been. I peered into one photograph and met the eyes of an old lady who seemed as aware of me as I was of her. She had a neat nest of white hair, severe black-framed glasses, blue eyes, and a crumpled mouth set in a straight line. ‘Granny Griffin,’ said Vickie. ‘All cleaned up.’
I had been eager to meet Vickie, ever since I had learned she told stories in the character of her grandmother, but especially keen after phoning her the previous evening from my motel room. Rarely in the course of chatty conversations do people bother to dredge their hearts and intellects for their deepest opinions, especially on difficult subjects like race or religion. It’s too hard, and most people are out of practice in the discipline of thinking, much less translating thought to speech. Yet the latter skill had been Vickie’s inheritance, and in between giving me directions to her barn and laughing over the urban legends of the Internet, she had spoken like a true child of Faulkner’s talk-besotted South. ‘The North–South thing isn’t real anymore. It’s dangerous to perpetuate that stuff. But there are differences. The South carries a deep kind of pain, and the North a sense of moral duty. Both can cripple a person, or a family. Or a country, I guess.’ On race she was upbeat: ‘Look, we’re still a young country, we’ll work it out. We have to find a big porch to sit on and tell each other stories, and not try to solve everything immediately … You know, I grew up with black kids and we loved each other. We still do. Why don’t people ever talk about that?’
The following morning, in her living room, over an hour and a half, Vickie did something I didn’t expect. Instead of distilling her conclusions for me, she verbally recreated the world in which she had formed them. It was like taking a crash course in someone else’s life.
This strange new universe began with its people: Granny Griffin was tall, had big feet, and wore support hose held in place with rubber bands just above the knee; Daddy Runt, her husband, who was extremely short; Jesse H, Vickie’s father, was famous in the family for pointing at you with his middle finger. (Vickie squinted, scowled, and jabbed at the air: ‘Now you listen to me …’). There was Ladonia Griffin, Daddy Runt’s mother, whom Granny loathed, calling her ‘Old Lady Doughknee Griffin’. And Aint Hattie, Daddy Runt’s sister, whom Granny also disliked. Granny had been born a Kitchen – pronounced Keet’chun – ‘I weren’t born no Griffin,’ she’d remind Vickie. The Kitchens were mean as snakes, but it was another branch of the family that, according to Granny, ‘had let the meanness in the door.’ Everyone on Granny’s side of the family was ‘peculiar’. As Granny said about one of her sons, ‘one more inch and he’d be over.’
All these people (‘I hate that you can’t meet them!’ cried Vickie several times), lived on the same street: Harberson Walker Road, known in the family for unexplained reasons as Habersham Walker Road (Granny and Daddy Runt could ‘kinda sorta read,’ said Vickie). Across the way was the Mixon’s cotton field, which ‘Old Man Mag’ plowed with a mule. Granny feuded with Eva Mixon as well. ‘She didn’t hate the Mixons,’ said Vickie. ‘It’s more that she saw through the outer crust of them – what they were trying to be versus who she KNEW them to be.’ Granny’s insights didn’t stop her from retaliating, however, when Eva took drastic measures to protect her chicken coop. ‘They killed each other’s dogs and chickens under cover of night and poison,’ Vickie explained.
Granny ate hog brains with a cut-up onion for breakfast, and put soda in her tea to make it black. She ‘had a hard opinion on religion’. She liked country churches, which taught you to be more scared of God than the Devil, but ‘she had no inhibitions with God. She could talk to him anywhere, it didn’t have to be in church.’ Granny believed that the first thing that happened when you died was that you went blind. The incentive in becoming a ghost was to come back and ‘take a peek at something familiar’, but since ghosts couldn’t see they bumped into things and scared you. Turpentine and kerosene made into a poultice kept them away.
Jesse H (the H stood for Hamm) had come from a family of tenant farmers – Granny had a hard opinion on them, too, ‘cause they wuz high-falutin’ – but her own family worked in the Kaolin mines (Kaolin is a wet, white, sticky clay used to make chalk). Daddy Runt, who had made moonshine whisky during the Depression but never drank a drop, had a talent for charming honeybees. He began each morning by pulling up peanuts (they grow underground on the roots of peanut plants), then put in a full day at the chalk mine, went fishing in the chalk pond, cleaned and ate the fish, and spent summer evenings shelling peas.
‘Now, none of us was gonna starve in 1960,’ said Vickie, ‘but we still had to put up food for winter as if our lives depended on it.’ Granny, Daddy Runt and Jesse H – who was the oldest of ten children and near to his in-laws in age – carried the stresses of the Depression, ‘When eatin’ was a privilege’, into Vickie’s childhood. Every night in summer the whole family sat on the front porch and shucked peas, butter beans and corn. Besides being useful, shucking accomplished two goals: it insured Granny’s admonition that, ‘There ain’t no good young ‘un unless it’s a tired young ‘un,’ and it provided an opportunity for storytelling.
‘It was ungodly hot, shelling all those peas,’ recalled Vickie. ‘Southern heat: it’s a cross between you and the weather. It has an attitude about it. Ignorance, immaturity and devastation are all mixed in there, because you had to function in it. It was never just a hot night, but what you brought to that hot night. Like resentment. What made it bearable were the stories and songs. Otherwise it was just like a black drape over you.’
Often as she spoke, tilting her head back, closing her eyes, and reaching out with both hands, as if she were conducting an invisible family choir, Vickie would say ‘Now hold it a minute, let me get this just right.’ I imagined her childhood as a great jigsaw puzzle in her head, stored in pieces, and that she would rather be tortured than not give me a perfect verbal model of each one, so I could grasp the big picture (a critical challenge, as that big picture is fast fading from the Southern landscape).
Vickie spoke sadly of the people she’d known as a child not realizing that they sat on top of the largest chalk deposit in the world. Now she had a precious resource of her own – memories of her childhood amongst these people – but the difference was that she fully grasped its value. I had an uncanny feeling that she had intuited the worth of her growing-up even as a little girl, and had been hyper-aware of every incident, every relative, every syllable uttered, and collected these as treasures she would draw upon in adulthood. (Vickie explained, slowly and carefully, that her family’s high spirits had sometimes crossed the line into violence; her powers of perception were honed young, reading signs in people’s behavior so as to be on the lookout for trouble, the better to avoid it.)
Now it had become her God-given responsibility to bring this vanished world and its prickly inhabitants into the present, without letting them fall into caricature. ‘I’ll die before I let Granny Griffin get plucked out of context by someone,’ she warned, ‘and turned into Granny Clampit [from The Beverly Hillbillies].’
By this time my hand – from taking notes – and my head were both aching, but Vickie’s obsession was infectious. I felt as if I were attending the birth of a storyteller as she painfully translated the particular, the personal, the people whose breath she had felt, into characters whose lives were no longer composed of strings of disconnected incidents, but were in the process of taking on larger meanings. ‘Until 1997, when I started performing, I saw ’em as real people, y’know, who they really were. Now they’re dramatized. If it’s not actually her [Granny] on stage, the audience at least has to recognize the idea of her.’
That idea conveys Vickie’s feelings about age, among other things. ‘Granny was old. And being old was a privilege.’ Not just for the elderly, who had survived, but for the youngsters who lived with them. Age connected worlds, tethered vanished relatives and their strange ways to everyday life. Old people took up the domestic overflow, could be counted on to be at home even when parents weren’t. They were a safe harbor in a tough world: something she considered most kids to be without these days, which is one reason she decided to give the children of central Georgia a communal grandmother.
Vickie had originally tried to write about Granny and her clan for a local newspaper, but repeatedly felt tugged back to the verbal. She found she’d had to make tapes and then painstakingly transcribe them to get at the spelling of Granny’s dialect. ‘Sand bed’ wasn’t what Granny had said, when she was yelling at the kids to sweep up the chalky dust in her front yard; it was say’nd beyd. Without hearing Granny, even when her voice is filtered through the eyes, her stories leak into the modern ‘anywhere’ world of Standard English. Dialect, according to Vickie, is a place marker, and maybe a marker in time as well; without it, the gulf between Granny’s world and ours narrows, and the truth, she said, is that they are not at all contiguous.
Once she decided that sound was more important than words, Vickie started telling stories at the local library in the character of Daddy Runt. ‘It was at Christmas. I decided to show the children the way Daddy Runt did his Christmas tree. He’d a cut a pine saplin’, then pull every needle off that poor thing. Then he’d dig a hole in the corner of the yard, set it in there, and wrap light bulbs – though he’d call ’em leyt boolbs – around every limb. Granny and I would sit on the porch and watch him. She had an eye for humor, struck through with a big vein of cynicism. Since she couldn’t control Daddy Runt, she’d give him a hard time. “Jus look at that poor-ass pine tree,” she’d say, “that thang’s as bald as Old Man Brown.”’
After a few incarnations as Daddy Runt, Vickie decided the costume was too hot, and switched to Granny. Instead of simultaneously portraying and narrating every move her grandfather made – self-narration had been a longstanding habit of his – she became Granny, and in character would describe what Daddy Runt had done to that poor tree, and then take on the shortcomings of almost everyone in Wilkinson County, and in neighboring Twiggs, Bib and Baldwin Counties as well. ‘My daddy’s family was strong-willed and aggressive, but Granny was obstinate. As you probably already know from just knowing people, period’ – she looked at me and I nodded hesitantly – ‘the outgoing fellers in life who talk big just slam into a stone wall when they come face to face with a passive-aggressive – emphasis on passive. Granny called it “bide’n her time”. She’d ugh-huh and ugh-huh (that means fake it), grimace and gesture when the ‘greats’ from Daddy’s family were around. But, later, she’d say, “Ooooh-wee, listen heah. Them Roberts ain’t nothin’ but trash. Heah they all come up the highway from Ocilla like a band’a gypsies, thankin’ Macon, Georgia was Somewhere. Back then Macon wut’n nothin’ – a one-trawf waterin’ hole maybe fer a tired mule, but’je Granny, heah, she ain’t got nothin’ in her heart fer Macon or nobody out’a Macon, includin’ them Collins’ses and that bunch’a Hamms. They ain’t nothin’ but talk. Granny could whup ’er one of ’em if she took the notion.”’
When I said Vickie became Granny, I meant it. Even without the costume – she’d shown me a picture of herself in a long dress, apron and bonnet, the bottom edges and corners of her mouth smudged with brown eye-shadow to imitate snuff stains – sitting in her air-conditioned living room on a sunny June morning, in her fashionable summer dress, fingernails and toenails painted bright red, Vickie Vedder became Granny Griffin. She scrunched her face, fixed her eyes wide, never once taking her pupils off mine. Her voice came out high and scratchy, like the ragged end of a rook’s cry, sustained and riding on a fast, cocky trot of vowels and consonants – utterly different from any other sound I’d heard her make. When she finished a particularly pithy phrase she’d make a kind of ‘put-that-in-your-pipe-and-smoke-it’ S curve with her head and shoulders, dropping the left one, raising the right, following it up with her left jaw, and ending with a cock of the right eyebrow. Now and then she’d splice in a mannerism of her father’s – the middle finger in the ‘know-it-all’ position – for extra emphasis. The effect was mesmerizing. The old lady was smart and funny, but because she had been so quickly conjured to life in a pretty, young body, I was too amazed (and a little alarmed) to laugh.
I stumbled into downtown Forsyth at an extreme ebb tide. I wasn’t depressed – on the contrary, I found Vickie elating – just utterly depleted. The town looked settled in its well-to-do ways, and baked pale in the mid-day heat. I parked in the shadow of the Monroe County Courthouse, a ponderous Victorian comment on law and order in red brick, topped by an Islamic-looking dome, which sat smack in the middle of town and effectively quartered Main Street into a square. Then I wandered into Russell’s Pharmacy to buy a pen (Vickie’s talk had used up my ink) and found that the Russells also ran a sandwich shop next door, with an old-fashioned ice cream counter and wrought iron tables and chairs. The funny thing was that each chair and table foot was covered in a slit-open, neon-yellow tennis ball. The effect against the otherwise black and white floor was surreal, as though it had been decorated by Magritte. I hoped the floor had recently been waxed, but I never found out.
A friendly woman at the counter offered me a pimento and cheese sandwich with extra mayonnaise, a combination I’d never heard of but Southern friends consider a kind of holy food, and coaxed me into a Coke float to go with it. I could barely understand her accent; in fact, she had to repeat ‘pimento’ several times before I got it. All of her words seemed glued together.
As carbohydrates and sugar rekindled my brain cells, I remembered what had been nagging at me all morning: Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s classic study, Honor and Violence in the Old South. One of the cornerstones of Wyatt-Brown’s argument stressed the honor code of the antebellum South: the idea that Southern morality was based on honor, a public virtue conferred by the community, as opposed to the self-regulating morality of private conscience, and that, consequently, slavery could function without contradiction in such a world, because honor required its opposite – abasement – in order to have value. The public element of this system intrigued me. When virtue is an external construct, an individual must base his self-worth on the opinions of others; no space is sanctioned for the consolation of private dignity. As Wyatt-Brown wrote, ‘public factors establishing personal worth conferred particular prominence on the spoken word and physical gesture as opposed to interior thinking or writing.’ He went on to add that, at heart, the ‘archaic concept that thought itself was a form of speaking’ had not died out in the pre-war South.
Thinking as a form of speaking remains a self-perpetuating legacy in parts of the South, or at least it did during Vickie’s childhood in Gordon, Georgia. If I had learned anything from her that was alien to my experience in America, it was precisely this. I wrote and Vickie talked. ‘My family is predisposed to talk,’ she had said, laughing, ‘and maybe think.’ Speech not only brought Granny Griffin back to life, it triggered something very like a dialogue in Vickie’s head between her childhood memories and her adult analysis. Following an in-character lecture on how ignorant folks rhernt (ruined) perfectly good peas and beans, Vickie paused to consider her grandmother. ‘From what I could tell about Granny,’ she explained, ‘is that as she aged, she began creating a private world of thought. She actually didn’t like her in-laws, her husband, the neighbors; a lot of the community style also didn’t jive with her natural inclinations to be a loner. Family life crowded in on her thoughts, and I feel like Daddy Runt was a “too busy” person to talk through things with her. This was observable from anyone watching them live out their lives.’
Vickie’s observation was made for my sake: it was the result of public display, of having an audience. It was, literally, thought as a form of speech. In North Toward Home, Willie Morris said there was something ‘spooked-up and romantic’ about a small town childhood in the South, which he attributes in part to growing up in a place where reading books was unacceptable. The imagination had to work itself out somehow, he said, and that was usually through talk, the endless telling of tales. In a rural world without access to other means of preservation – today Vickie mourns the fact that she never had a camera as a child – talk was both a family legacy and the means to a kind of private immortality. On countless summer evenings, shelling peas on the porch, Vickie’s living relatives made the dead as familiar as Old Man Mag, Eva Mixon and the mule, but as they spoke, they were in turn laying down their own investment in Vickie’s memory, for now she tells stories about the way they told stories.
‘I think my Granny Griffin, Daddy Runt, Daddy, Mama, and all their relatives have actually become characters and stories unto themselves,’ Vickie had said. ‘That’s because their storytelling styles, their lifestyles, and their mannerisms … are what’s worth knowing about them. It’s not what they said; it’s how they were affected by what they were saying, the people they thought of to remember … And it became a joy to the living members of our huge family to sit and listen to stories about the dead members and how they had acted when they were alive … To hear my daddy talk about the Collins family was funnier than actually knowing a Collins … All by himself, he could take you back to the spot where it all happened, so we were taken into his mind, and we loved him and his voice and how he raised his big old hands, his grin … He would say, “I can’t tell ye another word, I’m s’tickled by that crazy Ethel Collins. If her Mama had know’d what that gal was doing …” And on he’d go. And it was as if the whole clan, the whole farm, the whole scene was still important.’
My grandmother had only waved to me in silence in my dream-memory of the slides. Vickie’s grandmother had done one better: she had come alive again and spoken to me that very morning. In Vickie’s experience the past lived through speech. Granny Griffin was inside her and could come out at her bidding, because when she had really been alive they had talked. Granny had lived next door and talked to Vickie and through a constant funnel of stories had lent her not only her own life, but the lives of hundreds of other relatives stretching back down the ages. My family, by contrast, had shared landscapes – the beach at Cape Cod, Nantucket Sound and the big jetty where we’d fished into countless blue twilights – and it was into these places that we had spilled our love. They and the images we took of them silently testified that we had been happy together. They were our stories. But when we were pictured within them, waving or not, it was almost as icons of age or gender or some other universal attribute, like pleasure: Smiling Young Girl in Seascape; Heroic Man Fishing on Jetty. We individuals kept our narratives battened inside as silent memories, held close but not mythologized into family stories. Places glued us together but they were not wells into which we poured our spoken history, as Vickie’s family poured their words into Georgia.
Vickie and I are almost the same age; we both grew up in the 1960s. But whereas my memory is infiltrated with public television and private photographs – images concurrent with my childhood – Vickie, who grew up without a television set, remembers stories with roots trailing back into the deep, deeper, deepest past. What does it mean that I had lived in the suburban North, and Vickie in the rural South? Does it mean anything at all? I didn’t have answers yet, so I scribbled these questions on a napkin smeared with pimento-cheese, and very much hoped I’d figure them out before the end of my pilgrimage, two months later, in the bayous of Louisiana.
‘Where ya from?’ asked the woman at the counter.
‘Rhode Island,’ I guessed, hoping I’d understood the question. For good measure I complimented her on the Coke float.
‘You didn’t get that accent in Rhode Island,’ said a voice behind me. ‘There’s London in that voice.’
I was floored. LaMar Russell, owner of Russell’s Pharmacy, had read the invisible pedigree of my speech and found Wales in it (he thought it was London, but from the perspective of central Georgia, they’re close enough). It was uncanny. The thing is, I don’t think I have a discernible British accent; in fact most people think I’m from Virginia. I explained that I had gone to the University of Wales for graduate school, and had come to love the country so much that I often woke up astonished that I continued to live and breathe without the Welsh landscape and language. LaMar looked triumphant. The only other people to have spotted rogue signposts in my American diction were a gas-meter reader in Rhode Island and an elderly couple at Gatwick Airport. In the midst of discussing the outrage of delayed flights, the woman had grasped my hand and with feeling told me how good it was to meet someone from home. ‘We’ve been travelling for five months,’ she enthused, ‘and you’re the very first fellow Tasmanian we’ve met!’
As I told this story to LaMar and the woman I couldn’t understand, it occurred to me that Vickie had never told me a story. I laughed out loud. I hadn’t noticed until then.
