Long Time Leaving (42 page)

But that's my problem. What I want to share, with no promotional intent whatsoever, is that the promotional process can also enlighten me, belatedly, as to what I had in mind when I was writing. Or should have had in mind. The first few times I talk about a book of mine that has finally just come out—after all kinds of pulling and hauling and worrying about commas—I think to myself, “Hm. This book's not such a dead letter after all. This might actually be a pretty intelligible book for somebody who would just go away and read it.”

And then, as I trudge from interview to interview, I get so desperate to stop boring myself with that very same book that I start departing from the text. I come up with throwaway lines that wouldn't really fit in with the tone of the book, as such, but that will undoubtedly be remembered by more people than will ever open the book, as such.

Here are two things I repeatedly remarked with respect to my Robert E. Lee book: that if I had to pick a contemporary person who is most like Lee it would be Colin Powell, and that I was disappointed with the portrayal of Marse Robert in the movie
Gods and Generals
because the movie was so static and talky it should have been called
The Virginia Monologues.

So I'm on the road boiling my book down to things that aren't in it,
and gradually …uh-oh. I begin to suspect that when I wrote the book, I missed the point of it myself. I have just now figured out what the central insight of my book would be, if only I'd had the foresight to keep it from being published until after I presented it to the public.

For instance, after my memoir,
Be Sweet,
came out, I was making a thinly attended bookstore appearance in, let us say, Sopchoppy, Florida (it wasn't there, but isn't that a nice name for a town?), rattling on in public about this personally embarrassing book of mine for the umpteenth time, when I heard myself saying something new: that it wasn't just because I was made of something other than sugar and spice and everything nice that I found it so hard to respond when my mother told me, “Be sweet.” It was also because whenever anybody complimented my mother on anything, she would say, “Oh, you're just being sweet.” Would say it in a sad, tolerant tone that implied pretty clearly, even to someone whose capacity for true sympathy was as stunted as, say, mine: “You just don't know how much it would mean to me if you really meant that, but I realize, of course, that you're just …saying it.”

And right after I had that Sopchoppy epiphany, I noticed that a woman I grew up with, hadn't seen for thirty years probably, had showed up to hear my talk. We had a drink afterward, and she told me, “That was interesting, how angry you said your mother was. My mother was always furious at home.”

“No. Really? But we thought she was always so cheerful.”

“That's what we thought your mother was.”

Wow. Could it be that all the mothers I knew growing up were perkily lightsome to their neighbors and friends and convolutedly inconsolable by their loved ones at home? If
the As I Lay Dying
family, the Bundrens, had, in fact, been blown into our house by a hurricane, would they have been as startled by what we were really like as we by them? Maybe my book could have been as good as
As I Lay Dying,
if I'd just dug a little deeper….

We just don't know. We just don't know.

Nor do we know what Robert E. Lee was like inside. Listening to
The Sound and the Fury
on a long southerly car trip recently (it's surprisingly comprehensible when read well aloud), I was struck by how much Jason Compson had in common with Lee. His brother got to go to Harvard; he had to stay home and look after Mama. But Jason turned mean as a snake. Seemed to derive some satisfaction from being that way. Lee was self-punishingly earnest about being benign. Was involved in the slaughter of lots and lots of people, of course.

Here's something else I realized about Robert E. Lee, belatedly—after I'd finished the book, as such, and was going around trying to live down the “quintessential Southern commentator” thing and at the same time woo people into believing I had something worth $19.95 to
say inside
the book.

I was at Stratford Hall in Virginia, the ancestral home where Lee was born. Before I spoke about my book at a luncheon there, they gave me a tour through the estate. In what was little Robert's bedroom, I saw the angels. When Robert was not quite four years old, the family had to give up Stratford Hall because his profligate father, Light-Horse Harry Lee, had thrown away the family fortune. As they were about to close Stratford's doors behind them for the last time, according to a family story, little Robert ran up to his bedroom to say good-bye to the angels in his fireplace. I didn't include this story in my book because, I don't know, I'm not exactly an angel buff, and it all seemed just a bit cutesy, not to mention undocumented.

But then I went into little Robert's bedroom and saw that his fireplace was quite low to the floor. I got down on my knees to look into it from a not-quite-four-year-old boy's viewpoint, and I saw the angels. They weren't the full-figure winged creatures I'd imagined. They were two little cherub faces, not cute but conceivably companionable. I thought about little Bobby telling those little faces good-bye, and for the first time in all my researches, my heart went all the way out to him.

I started rewriting my book in my head, thinking of the
Killer Angels
connection, and—it hit me: the connection I should have made between Lee's life (my notion of it, anyway) and my version of mine.

But you may not have read either of the actual physical between-covers books in question yet. Go do that first—you don't have to
buy
it, but, come to think of it, that is a good way to get ahold of one. I say “it.” By that I mean both of them. And then I think you will see why, when the angels gave me that flash of recognition, I realized what made Robert E. Lee's life so unhappy. Slavery, of course, was a factor. And his awful father. But the psychological reason, I'll bet, was that his mother told him to be sweet, and he
was.

N
ever mind what Robert E. Lee named his horse, I don't think of travel as a Southern tradition. “When I was growing up in Georgia in the forties and fifties, it would no more have occurred to us to visit, say, Europe, just to
see
it for some reason, than California or some place like that. Or …Charleston, even. “We weren't related to anybody in Charleston, why would we go there?

My father traveled a lot, but that was for business and—though in retrospect I wonder about this—a cross he had to bear. For his two weeks of vacation every summer, we would drive off in the family car not in search of refreshing new vistas but “back home” to visit my parents’ folks in Jacksonville, Florida, where it was even hotter.

Mainly we'd visit with the relatives, and there were never any kids on either side of the family close to my age, but one day we'd go to the beach and the boardwalk (fiddler crabs and saltwater taffy), and another day the men and I would go out in a comfortably grotty, congealed-bits-of-old-bait-lined skiff and catch an abundance of whiting and croakers (the latter made a croaking noise, a mating call perhaps, as they died in the fish well) and bring them back to my grandparents’ house to clean and fry them up, with hush puppies. That, I want to tell you, was some good eating. And we actually did authentically give an occasional literal hush puppy to the dogs, not at all self-consciously, didn't think anything of it, though of course we saved plenty of hush puppies for ourselves. But it wasn't the kind of thing a travel magazine would devote an article to, not a hot new getaway destination. “Which was okay with us.

Then I went away to college and liked it. By
it
I mean college, and I also mean away. I've been traveling ever since. And not feeling quite right about it. I keep hearing my mother's voice saying, “We don't have any business in this world going off somewhere for something something
when there are plenty of perfectly nice something somethings right here at home.”

Here are some travel rules. They derive, as everything else derives, from some combination of where I come from and why I came from it:

1. Before you try a strange barbecue place, roll down your window and make sure it smells good from the car. But then if your attention wasn't caught by the aroma in the first place, why did you stop?
   

2. Never try a down-home restaurant whose sign is misspelled on purpose
   (VURNUN'S CAFFAY),
   nor an imported-cuisine restaurant whose sign is misspelled by accident
   (L'BONN FORMAGE).
   

3. Abroad, carry enough bottled water that you won't have to drink any unbottled water but not so much that you will have to use the restrooms.
   

4. If, after trying for days to be patient and forbearing in a foreign-speaking country, you are tempted to scream, “WILL YOU PLEASE STOP SPOUTING THAT INFERNAL GIBBERISH!” at people who live there, just for your own relief, remember this:
   they
   may understand what
   you
   are saying and may take it personally. If they live in a part of the world that is at all suitable for tourism, they will at least have figured out that
   gibberish
   is English for, say, French, or whatever. In a pejorative sense. They may go into a shell, or misdirect you disastrously in weird near-English, or disappear for a few moments and then come back and run into you on one of those nasty little motorbikes. Then you have to go to foreign
   court—
   and if you think you heard gibberish before …!
   

5. Never hand your expensive camera to an indigenous person and ask him to photograph you and the rest of your party, if he looks like he can run faster than everyone in your party. (Even if he doesn't look like it, he can.)
   

6. Don't show the slides of your trip to anyone who does not appear in them. Slides, unless they are salacious, gruesome, or of museum quality, and usually even if they are of museum quality, are endurable only by people who appear in them. Or whose children appear in them. (Young children. Sensible parents do not want to see candid snaps of their teenagers away from home.) People who owe you money? They will sit through your slides. But if they are not
   in
   your slides, and they don't have a child, a young child, who is in them, they will consider their debt discharged. All this goes double for video.
   

7. Don't worry about remembering whether a dromedary has one hump and a camel two, or vice versa, because whichever one you tell people you rode, they will give you a surprised look and say what a shame, you really should have ridden the other.
   

8. While you are away, the weather at home will be unseasonably fine, the team you root for will win its most unforgettable victory, and the emperor and empress of whatever exotic country you are visiting will pay a surprise visit to your neighborhood and invite your next-door neighbors to come see them any time at the castle, though preferably not this time of year, when all the tourists flock to the more obvious attractions and everyone who is authentic clears out.
   

9. If you decide to swing by the town of Sweetlip, even though it will make your drive much longer, on the assumption that it must be a charming town with such a name, you will find that it was named after Garner W. Sweetlip, who founded the town in 1951 around its principal industry, a plant that converts catfish viscera and old mesh caps into eleven hundred tons of commercial fertilizer an hour, not to mention by-products and effluent, samples available. It's pronounced “Swillup.”
   

10. Never make eye contact with someone else's young child on a plane. That is what the parent prays for. A parent of a young child on a plane is liable to open up the emergency hatch and bail out if he or she can justify it by thinking that somebody else has accepted even a split-second's responsibility for the child. “No one will blame me for leaping to my death if it was clear that I knew that someone was there to look after little Rachel as she was wallowing on the tray table rubbing pudding in her hair and screeching”—we, who have been parents of young children on airplanes ourselves, have all been there.
    

11. Don't heave yourself up out of your airplane seat by jerking down on the back of mine, for God's sake. Just because you don't know me from Adam and we are both happy to keep it that way, doesn't mean you can treat me like a part of the furniture. You wouldn't do that at home.
    

I need a travel rule that is less defensive.

My sister, Susan (who is considerably younger than I am and therefore was still growing up when a kind of sea change occurred and my parents started going to the Cotswolds and places like that), has called to say she's back from Egypt. Now that—as part of the Holy Land—might have been a place that people I grew up with would have considered traveling to, if they were going to travel to any place foreign, which they weren't, but at least there would be scriptural authority for it.

Susan went there, though, because she has an Egyptian friend. She was surprised, as I would have been, to note that parts of Egypt still look like the Bible—well, no, what she said was, the men still wear those things that look like nightgowns, as in the illustrations. But now they
have motor vehicles, so camels are butchered and sold to poor people for meat. Seems a shame. I'd like to go to Egypt, but by the time I get there it probably won't look any more like the Bible than California does. Southern California, that is, which by then may look like a desert.

Cuba is where I always wanted to go, if only because the federal government (post-Carter) doesn't want me to. Then one night I talked to some people who had been there over Christmas. That is the kind of company I find myself in, in the Northeast: people who will just up and spend their family Christmas in a Communist country, and not because they were abducted and forced to and are writing it up for the
Reader's Digest
either, and they don't even smoke cigars (not that we did either, growing up). Anyway, do you know what these people said? They said the food in Cuba was terrible. As good as Cuban food in Miami is. Because, basically, there isn't much food in Cuba.