Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir (12 page)

Willie Bell was unfailingly kind in her sangfroid way. From her arrival at seven a.m. until she left for afternoon rest, the house was a better place to be. My father was gone, which helped, and I was at home with Mother and Willie Bell—if only it could stay like that. They planned the menu, straightened the house. Mother went to the beach while Willie Bell washed underwear or vacuumed. If Mother shopped, she honked when she got back and they unloaded the groceries and started dinner. The orderly world of The House, my favorite game, metaphor, reality. I set up a parallel house in the breakfast room, laid my dolls on the corn silk as Willie Bell shucked, ironed my doll dresses
as Willie Bell ironed, cooked on the toy electric stove as Willie Bell cooked. I always had the father away at a war. The black face of the reversible doll lay head to head with the bisque face of the doll that belonged to my mother when she was a child. All I knew on the subject of race was the Sunday school song “Red and yellow, black and white / They are precious in His sight / Jesus loves the little children of the world.” I mixed the song up with “Autumn leaves are now falling / Red and yellow and brown / Autumn leaves are now falling / See them tumbling down.”

If this sounds too archaic to believe, believe me.
When I went to Nicaragua a couple of years before the revolution, my friend there picked me up in his big green Mercedes. I’d known him as a poet in Princeton; he’d gone home and become the secretary to Somoza, something like a prime minister. As we rolled through the streets I had glimpses of poor—very poor—people parting in the streets to let the rude chauffeur’s horn through. I was alarmed. “Why aren’t they throwing rocks at us?” was the first question I asked in that country. My friend answered, “Because they don’t know to.”

Willie Bell didn’t “know to,” either, though soon she’d learn a stronger approach than rocks. Within her range of action, she felt lucky to go to the beach, or so she told me. I think she enjoyed her mornings with my mother, who was never a prima donna and would crack crabs, rinse out bathing suits, shell lady peas, and wash the salty windows. They laughed and gossiped. As at home, on Sea Island Willie Bell soon knew everything through the maids’ grapevine.

My mother would have stayed forever. Sea Island suited her essential sense of life: a tropical island of perpetual vacation from the reality of her daily life. Sometimes days were too long for me and I wished we were at Uncle Mark’s house near Daytona Beach, where there was a Ferris wheel and boardwalk and a shop where a parrot on a string cursed while I bought a cherry snow cone. My sisters liked the St. Simons lifeguards who came over at night and played canasta and bridge. I spied from behind the sofa. Later, they’d go to the beach to look for loggerhead turtle eggs. At Sea Island there was no one to play with. Alicia was prissy and wanted only to dress and undress her dolls. She did not like to get wet.

I wrote my name and address on squares of paper and put them in pickle jars. On one I quickly added
I am a prisoner. Save me
. I asked Daddy to give them to shrimp boat fishermen to take out to sea. I never had answers from Nassau or England, as I hoped. My sisters found boys and took off on the backs of scooters. Everyone at Sea Island seemed old. All there was to do besides play on the beach was to swim at the Cloister pool and order club sandwiches and ginger ale out under the umbrellas. The pages of
Anne of Green Gables
and
Freddy Goes to Florida
stuck together in the humidity and developed small green speckles.

On Saturday nights my parents dress up and go to the Cloister or the King and Prince bar. I have to go to dinner, too, all scratchy in organdy pinafore over sunburn, the food hidden under pale sauces, and old men, mostly belly, talking about what kind of season the Bulldogs might have and ol’ Harry giving
them hell in Washington. I think Truman looks like a parakeet. I eat all the grapes out of the finger bowls. After dinner a band plays “I’ll Dance at Your Wedding,” “Some Enchanted Evening,” which was my mother’s theme song, and “Rum and Coca-Cola,” and Mother dances with all the men and Daddy goes off somewhere until he comes back with that mean expression on his face, the half-curl smile you could think was pleasant unless you knew him. Then he wants to go home and she won’t and I press my ankles together, waiting, hoping they won’t erupt among all the nice people. At home, a few drinks. Something broken. They shout names, push each other around. Their routine and it never ceased to terrify.

Once she wouldn’t give him the keys when he wanted to roar off somewhere at two in the morning. They chased around the house like two dogs. I was the only one who could calm my father. The absurdity of a sixty-pound human as a peacemaker got through even to him. When I stood in the doorway, sometimes he could not go on. “Hey, Bud, how’re you doing?” His voice shifts to sweet. He rubs my hair back off my forehead and I smile up at him. Though I might want to throw boiling water in their faces, I would instead stand there in my flowered seersucker nightgown, forcing my eyes to look as blue as possible. To react naturally would make me like them; I had to be smarter. They were trapped on a small grid. (Thanks to my parents, I sometimes recognize small grids when I get on them.) I never heard the word “divorce” pass between them. I’d known only one “broken home.” The mother worked in the dime store; the father took off for Jacksonville, Florida, and sent the two
boys drugstore cards signed “Love, Daddy” on their birthdays. Divorce happened to those who were not very nice. We had love, much love, but it was scumbled. On the island, late at night, often I ran to Willie Bell.

Willie Bell likes looking at magazines. She keeps a little fan turned on her feet. That famous profile. Turning pages, she drinks Coke, and the red lamp sheds a glow on her dark brown sugar skin. In bed with her hair down, she looks different. By day she wears her hair in a bun and wet plum lipstick. Seeing her like this seems strange. I always see her ironing or cooking. Here she stretches out, the covers kicked back, her shoulders bare. She smells of rose oil. Both of her incisors are mostly gold. She has big lips and a delicate but work-strong body. If someone ever hands her a tennis racket, she’ll whack the ball right over the net. She wears an old gown of my mother’s. When I ask why the soles of her feet are white, she says, “The Lord dipped the African people in the dark to protect them from the sun. Their feet are white because he held them from the ankles.”

“Then why aren’t the tops white, too?”

“You’ll have to ask Him.”

When I asked if I could stay with her, she never had to ask why. I looked out Willie Bell’s front window at my parents in the kitchen, watching their gestures and faces as they slung drinks and leaned forward, hands on hips, to taunt each other. Willie
Bell rarely remarked on them. How could she refrain? She was wise. A slip from me about anything she said would be expensive. For no reason, sometimes my father would call her in the middle of the night and fire her. He got these crazes. The next day my mother would apologize and say “You know how he gets.” Yes, Willie Bell knew. Since her husband was slow and much older, probably a liability at the mill, she was not going to disagree with anything.

Late, after the pyrotechnics were over, I’d hear Willie Bell’s soft snore. The tide, at its lowest, dragged back through the deep coquina shells, a sound like someone stepping on fine broken glass. This sound, and Willie Bell’s breathing. I’d lie awake listening as long as I could. The fan on the dresser looked like a small black face slowly shaking its head in the dark.

Beyond the tabby wall behind Willie Bell’s cottage, waist-high palmettos began. I am forbidden beyond the wall because quicksand could swallow me if I misstepped. I look down as I run, not only for quicksand but for coral snakes. I’d seen many moccasins, greasy blue, moving the way a hose moves when you cut off the spray at the nozzle. I didn’t know other poisonous snakes but I imagined the bright twist of body in the white sand, like the delicate coral necklace in my mother’s jewelry box suddenly come to life.
If one bites your finger, you have to have your finger cut off quickly or you’ll die
. What if one bites your stomach?
You’d never know what hit you
. Palmettos slash against my legs. I run fast.

When I stop the sand is cool. I sift handfuls over my feet. Where is the big red woodpecker called Lord God? I sit still, hoping I will hear one of the small island deer clattering toward me through the knife-sharp leaves. If I am still as a bush for a long time, a deer might come and rub its face against mine, even lie down beside me and let me rub its speckled side. The deer might think I am one of them and I could step quietly with her toward the marsh grass.

In the palmetto jungle I imagine myself living like the Swiss Family Robinson, making bowls from shells, a roof from palmetto, fashioning a scoop out of a gourd, catching rainwater on the tip of my tongue from oak leaves. Tarzan and Jane live somewhere in here. I have no idea how small the island is or that it’s owned by a corporation, which blocks Jews, much less riffraff like the shipwrecked. As I walk back home, I search the shrubs for parrot nests. Low in the palmetto I find a small nest made of dune grass and twigs. Three mottled blue eggs. I run all the way home. When I see my father’s car pulling in the driveway, I cut over to the far side of the yard.

My mother sits at the kitchen table, polishing her nails poppy red. She hears the heavy crunch of tires on the oyster-shell drive and looks up to see the white curve of Daddy’s fender turning in. Already Friday again. She screws the top on the polish and spreads out her fingers to dry. She sees him, his thin scissor legs swinging out of the Oldsmobile, his rumpled seersucker suit, the way he holds his head slightly to one side. He wipes his face with a handkerchief and turns toward the ocean for the relief of a sea breeze. There is none. Unconsciously, he places his hand
over his side where the bullet hit him. The island air is so thick it seems to congeal as he breathes.

He kisses her forehead. She glances at the stove clock. She could set it by his arrival each week. She can repeat without asking his answers about the week he just spent at home in Fitzgerald, but they go through the script anyway. She thinks of Oscar, the severely retarded neighbor at home, always asking the temperature. She’d made up temperatures every day for years, as though it ever had changed for him in his thirty years or ever would. She might bring up buying a house at Sea Island, but Daddy always says renting is costing him buckets of dollars and nobody notices and does she think he’s made out of money? Enough never will be enough, he says. I linger, looking at them facing off for the weekend. Her hair streaked blond from the sun, him holding up the frosted bottle to the window to see how much is left.

I quietly let myself in the breezeway door. In my room, I hide the egg in a thumb of my white gloves in the top drawer, cover it with the other glove and wrap them in two handkerchiefs to keep the egg warm until it hatches. Every day I slowly slide out the drawer expecting a small bird with green jungle eyes to look out at me.

Willie Bell meets other maids easily and begins to go out with them on Saturday nights and Mondays. They go to the colored beach and to juke joints in Brunswick. I see her fastening her garter belt and slipping into sling-back shoes. Putting something from a little pot on her eyes. They darken, almond shaped, more like Nefertiti’s than ever. Ten years later, when
she leaves us for a new life in Chicago, my mother is sure Kitty first put ideas in Willie Bell’s head. By then Orval Faubus is banging the school door in Little Rock, and waves of blacks are heading north, but my family blames Willie Bell’s departure on Kitty’s gold charm bracelet and high shrieking laugh that always dropped off when my parents came into the room.

Now, I still go back to the Georgia islands. I try to imagine my parents there, content and old, the parties and drinking over. Did they never want to stay home and play mah-jongg, make an omelet, and read? Who they really were remains unknowable, one of those “solve this or lose your life” riddles. Was it getting married in the Depression, furtively running away in the middle of the night, that started them off on this endless restlessness? I wonder if she ever tried to find another man on these summer trips. I certainly would have. Someone elegant from the North with graying temples and a bankroll. Her longing for a fuller life was a constant. As far as I know she never took a positive step to get it. Because of her beauty, because her own father adored her, because so many wanted to marry her, because, because, she continued to expect the life she was promised simply would materialize out of very thin air.

I see them with all their good qualities at the forefront. There they are on the breezeway, magically come to their senses and putting together Legos with a rapt grandchild. Normal. They garden and go to movies and Daddy helps clean up after dinner. They’d be bird-watchers, counting egrets over the marsh at evening,
gathering signatures on a petition to protect the turtles. Ha, imagine that.

The good trick of memory: I imagine them any way I want. Willie Bell remains in the little brick house. She’s looking at an old
McCall’s
magazine. If I run to the door she’ll look up and say, “Come on in and sit but you’ll have to entertain yourself ’cause I’m all out of chat.”

Jekyll Island was deserted when I was a child. Robber barons bought the island in 1896 and built vacation mansions. When they abandoned them during the difficult World War II years, the government closed the island.

From St. Simons, we could motor over there, my sister Nancy, her boyfriend Neil, and I. We cross the marshes of Glynn, going around Jekyll to the ocean side because we aren’t supposed to land. This is where the illegal ship
The Wanderer
once anchored and let off the last load of slaves in the United States. The houses are enormous, larger than the fanciest ones at Sea Island. Somehow Nancy and Neil disappear behind a tree swagged with moss. The breaking waves emphasize an absolute quiet. Algae long since has invaded the swimming pools half-full of froggy water. The delicate green embroidery of resurrection fern covers live oak limbs. Stone urns and naked nymphs holding baskets of fruit startle me as I wander through the overgrown grounds. Up on stone terraces French doors swing and bang, disturbing only chameleons sunning on the steps. I go in a long room and from a black leather chaise longue pick up a
letter addressed to the Cranes, the name stamped on toilets and stationery boxes at home. I take down a dusty game of Parcheesi from a bookshelf. This is better than
The Mystery at Lilac Inn
or any other book I’ve read.