Littlejohn (14 page)

“It’s not
you
,” I’d say once in a while when they seemed especially cut to the quick. “It’s just this place.”

Which was only partly true, in retrospect. It would not have been a wonderful life, coming back to East Geddie to run a farm and live among people who knew everything about me and my parents and probably my grandparents. I went back to my twenty-year high school reunion, which they held at a Holiday Inn twenty miles from the old school, for some reason. It was “dry,” which didn’t seem to bother anyone else. I wished that I’d brought a fifth. The worst thing was that these people, who all grew up together, seem to visit each other about as often as if they lived in separate states. There were people there who live five miles apart who seemed to be catching up on five years of news. One of the few pleasant things I could imagine about a return to East Geddie was the fantasy of getting back together with my oldest friends, after we’d raised our families and had our careers—sort of like one of those sitcom reprises where all the characters from a fifties or sixties show come back as adults under some trumped-up premise and pick up where
they left off. But I don’t believe it happens that way in real life. Not in East Geddie, anyhow.

The bottom line, though, truth be known, is probably that I never could face the prospect of sacrifice. This is not a solitary failing; my friends in the English department and I talk about it often. What do you do for aging parents who took care of their aging parents until the bitter end, come bedpans, Alzheimer’s, nervous breakdowns (yours) or whatever? And the amazing thing is, with Daddy and Mom, they didn’t even seem to mind. Even Mom, who was taking care of Daddy’s mother and brother and sister, with precious little appreciation, I might add, didn’t seem to bear any resentment. I would have borne quintuplets of resentment, had it been me. I see a therapist once a week now; I’d need a session a day to put up with what Mom endured. Except she didn’t “endure” or even “accept.” From the moment she married Daddy, she must have embraced his family as hers. It probably helped that her parents, or adopted parents, died not long after she and Daddy were married. They were much older.

After Jeff and I separated, I talked with his mother, on the phone, one time. This year, I didn’t send his parents a Christmas card.

Daddy has been gypped, swindled. It isn’t all my fault. I am a child of my times. We’re the ones who paved the way for the Me Generation. By the time I’m old and Justin is middle-aged, children probably will be allowed to give their parents a competency test every year, and when the scores dip enough, they’ll be permitted to send us to the showers, like the Jews. Sort of like SATs for the human race. Or maybe final exams.

It was shortly after Christmas of 1955 that my Uncle Gruff called and invited us to come down for a week in March. Uncle Gruff’s real name is Cerrogordo. That’s why he’s so gruff, Daddy would tell me. He and Aunt Martha lived in Atlanta most of the time I was growing up, but they moved to the west coast of Florida for about five years before they found out early retirement didn’t suit either one of them.

Daddy didn’t think we ought to go, because there was so much work to do on the farm, but Mom convinced him that the Lockamys could make do for one week in March. He finally agreed, using the excuse that it would do Aunt Connie and Uncle Lex good to get away for a while, too. I’m sure Mom would have preferred for just the three of us to go, but that was out of the question.

So we packed the five of us into our green Chevrolet, Daddy and Lex in the front seat, Mom, Aunt Connie and me in the back, dressed as if we were going to church. It was the first time we’d been able to make such a trip, because Grandma had only died the year before. They had to take me out of school for a week, which I didn’t mind a bit.

Thus began The Trip to Florida, capitalized because of its singular nature—my parents never went there again—and because Daddy almost killed Uncle Gruff and found a way to make money farming, a secret that had eluded our family for generations.

We drove all day and stayed at a motor court in Hardeeville, South Carolina. I remember being very discouraged because we had only gone through one state. I was eight then, and I couldn’t wait to get to the state with my name, Georgia.

Then the next morning, we were in Georgia almost immediately and before we knew it, we were out of Georgia and into Florida. Daddy stopped and took my picture at the state line: one shot in front of the Florida sign, then across the road for a shot of me holding my arm out toward the Georgia sign, like, this is
my
state.

Uncle Gruff and Aunt Martha lived at a place called Jackson Island, on the Gulf of Mexico, and we had to cut across the top part of Florida to get there. A two-lane road connected the island with the mainland, across this huge savannah. It was the most lonesome place I’d ever been in my life. There were about fifty houses along the beach road, and you had to go back across the bridge to get to a grocery store. Uncle Gruff had a boat, and he’d fish for shrimp and red snapper and all kinds of seafood. I, of course, didn’t like fish, so they’d fix me hamburgers or spaghetti.

The worst thing about Jackson Island was the waves. There weren’t any. There was this beautiful white sand, like sugar, and there were gulls all over the place, but the Gulf around Jackson Island was like a big pond, with little ripples about six inches high. The ironic thing is that when a hurricane comes up, the waves get even higher than they do in the Atlantic, which is why Jackson Island isn’t inhabited anymore.

There were also jellyfish everywhere, from little ones that just stung a little bit to big ugly ones that would raise welts. Daddy said his main memory of that trip was me standing waist deep in the Gulf, doing a complete circle every few steps to keep an eye out for jellyfish, and Uncle Gruff yelling out, “There’s one, Georgia!” every once in a while, just to see me jump and scream.

There was something about standing out there in the Gulf of Mexico and looking across this flat, empty expanse that ran for a thousand miles that made me feel somehow deserted. I can’t stand to be at a beach without lots of people; I’d rather go to Virginia Beach, where you can barely find space for your towel, than one of those TV beaches where some jerk strolls along the sand with his dog, no other human beings in sight, while he ponders the tragedy of receding hairline. It’s strange, but mountains don’t affect me that way. Jeff and I used to rent a cottage up on the west side of the Blue Ridge for a week every summer, and I couldn’t get enough of just staring off into the side of a mountain from a rocking chair. But don’t leave me alone at the beach.

We stayed at Jackson Island from Sunday afternoon until early Saturday morning. Uncle Gruff was a great storyteller, and everybody wanted to hear the old, old stories, ones that had been handed down like heirlooms from a widowed aunt to an older sister. Daddy knew a few, too, and between him and Gruff, I think they must have covered the whole family, all the way back to Scotland. It was the first of many tellings I can remember, and I never got tired of them.

Uncle Gruff told about how Captain McCain, my great-grandfather, came up the river from Newport, almost broke and on his way back home to Randolph County to play the prodigal returning, about how he heard about the job at Amos Geddie’s sawmill while sitting in a tavern in Port Campbell and walked all the way to Geddie to talk his way into a supervisor’s position. He said he’d been out west, fighting Indians or Mexicans or whatever. His family were Quakers, and he must have been the black sheep.

Daddy chimed in with the part about how the Captain
wooed Amos’s daughter, Barbara, who was two years older than him, and no beauty to boot, and how he extorted the 320 acres of Geddie land nearest to the Blue Sandhills as a wedding present.

“And Mallie and Zebediah, too, don’t forget that,” Gruff said, and Daddy told us about the Captain’s slaves, a couple and the one child they were allowed to take with them from the Geddie farm to the new one that was just being built, about how Mallie had to change her name to McCain, then changed it back to Geddie as soon as the war was over.

Gruff told us about the first time Captain McCain came to Geddie Presbyterian Church, when he was courting Barbara, how they told him he’d have to stand, because all the pews belonged to individual families, and how he shamed everyone by sitting on a footstool up by the choir, then putting a ten-dollar gold piece into the offering plate.

Daddy told how the captain and his son, Red John, along with the rest of the home guard, met the Union army in front of the church, supposedly to surrender, and how someone started shooting. Daddy said it was Red John, his and Gruff’s daddy, but Gruff said it wasn’t. Between them, they told how the Yankees chased the home guard into the sandhills and then burned everything to the ground. My favorite part was where they set the sawdust pile at the lumber yard afire and it burned and smoldered for twenty years. They called it Yankees’ Revenge.

Then Aunt Connie told about the hard times after the war, when Red John’s two brothers gave up their shares of the farm and went to work for their fathers-in-law, and how Red John had brought it back, borrowing for seed in the spring and using most of the harvest to pay back the loan, praying
that the crops didn’t fail. And Gruff told about how Red John married Faith Geddie when he was forty-nine and she was twenty-three and a widow, and about the funny names they gave their children.

They’d talk and argue and correct all night on the porch, looking out across the almost-silent waters, and I took in every word, without even knowing it at the time.

It was Thursday night that Daddy got into the argument with Uncle Gruff. Daddy almost never lost his temper, but Gruff had read something about
The Diary of Anne Frank
, which had just been made into a play, and he said that he was tired of hearing about the damn Jews, that all they’d ever done to him in Atlanta was screw him out of money, and that maybe Hitler wasn’t on the wrong track after all.

Uncle Gruff had been drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon for about three hours when he said that, and I’m sure he didn’t really mean it, or at least I hope he didn’t, but he was always throwing around words like “nigger” and “kike” like loose change. Even in the South in 1956 he stood out, no mean feat.

Daddy didn’t raise his voice.

“Don’t be talking about something you don’t know nothing about, Gruff,” he said. He was drinking Coke and he put the glass down.

Uncle Gruff was quiet for a second or two, then he started ranting and raving about how he’d half-raised Daddy (Daddy said later all he remembered Gruff raising was hell) and how he wasn’t going to take that from somebody who had to get his wife to teach him how to write his name, so what the shit did he know about politics?

Daddy told him to watch his mouth. He was a little red in the face now. But Gruff wouldn’t stop. He finally made Daddy snap when he started telling us about how he used to come to Daddy’s classroom at school and there would be Daddy sitting over in the corner crying because he couldn’t read. Uncle Gruff was a mean drunk.

Daddy got up and went in the kitchen. He came back out with the biggest, nastiest-looking butcher knife that Uncle Gruff and Aunt Martha had taken with them from Atlanta when they retired. He walked right over to Gruff, who was trying to walk backward while still in his chair, so that he looked like one of the crabs we’d see at night on the beach, and he stuck the knife right in Gruff’s face.

“If you don’t shut up about the Jews, and if you don’t shut up about me,” Daddy told him in a strained voice so unlike his usual bass that it scared me more than the knife, “I’ll cut your D head off.” Daddy didn’t like cursing; he might have cut Uncle Gruff’s head off without ever uttering a profanity.

He backed Gruff up to the wall, where he was getting sober in a hurry. Uncle Lex tried to talk to him, and Aunt Connie took me into the hallway leading back to the bedrooms. Gruff told Daddy he was sorry, and Mom managed to walk up to him and take the knife away. Gruff sulked all the next day, but they shook hands when we left, and Gruff came to see us every year or so, even more after Aunt Martha died.

Daddy didn’t show me the pictures from Germany until I was a junior in high school. Where we lived, there was nothing but white Anglo-Saxon Protestants in the high
school. The blacks and Indians went to their own schools, and all the Jews lived in town. I guess they burned the Catholics at the stake or something.

It’s painful for me to look back and see the way we were, but all the I’m-sorry’s in the world won’t make it any different.

They had integrated the schools that year, fall of 1965, and nobody—at least, nobody white—was very happy about it. Even Daddy grumbled about the federal government trying to tell us what to do, and Mom said it would be the end of the state education system. Even then, whites were pulling their kids out of schools all over and starting their own segregation academies.

The first two years, it was voluntary. There were six blacks in the junior class, another seven in the sophomore class and a dozen freshmen. Their lives must have been total hell. Nobody actually did serious bodily harm to any of them, just called them niggers about two trillion times, and painted it on their lockers, and laughed at their accents—which weren’t much if any worse than ours, probably—and in general tried to make them commit suicide.

One of them did. Latricia Wonsley was her name. She went home after her biology teacher ridiculed her for “axing” for something and the whole class joined in, reducing her to tears. She went home, got a chair from the kitchen table, stood on it with a piece of clothesline she’d cut, tied it around her neck and secured it to a light fixture, kicked the chair away and hanged herself right there in the living room. They said she had been an A student at her old school, Carver High, and her parents expected her to show the white kids at Geddie High what a smart black girl could do when she had
the chance. She obviously never had the chance. A month before she killed herself, someone had smeared her locker door, which was right next to mine, with Crisco, a crude allusion to the Royal Crown Pomade black people used in those days when they still so desperately seemed to need to be white. A couple of white boys allegedly exposed themselves to her in an empty classroom, and nobody was ever punished. There were different books, different methods, and nobody ever tried to help Latricia Wonsley figure them out.