Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir (4 page)

I always have visited my good friends in Chapel Hill—Anne, close to me since Randolph-Macon Woman’s College days, and her family. When I was invited to start a furniture collection in High Point, we began to travel more frequently to North Carolina. Ed researched universities, cultural life, and the proximity
to a good airport, so when friends asked why we were moving to “the dropping-off place,” we mentioned those attributes, plus the four distinct seasons. But, really, such an uprooting is instinctual. Time to rebel. Internal gears began to grind, propelling you forward—then you invent the reasons.

My ties with California had been fraying for a while. I loved my university life, and my department encouraged experimentation; we never bogged down into the dangerous repetition of teaching the same play or novel thirty times. But the teaching load was tough. Until I was department chair, I taught four intense graduate courses each semester. One Christmas Eve, as I was sitting down to dinner with my family and friends, a student called. “I’ve got to read you what I just wrote. I think it’s my best.” I refrained from saying, “Do you know it’s eight o’clock on Christmas Eve?” I listened to several long stanzas. At the table, my family and guests banged their glasses and groaned, but, really, I was touched that he felt free to call, and I liked his poem. There’s little to compare with the privilege of mentoring those who strike out into the wilderness of a creative life. But after many years, my own writing became limited to the summer break.

After my first book of prose,
Under the Tuscan Sun
, unexpectedly took off with a life of its own, I had just barely enough financial stability to take a chance and quit my job. Should I? I decided to step off that X, gamble on my writing, and give up secure tenure. When in doubt, I reasoned, fly. I’d taught for twenty-three years. Time for the new.

I was surprised when the intense bonds with most of my colleagues faded quickly. Twenty-three years and it was as if we’d been on a cruise ship together, had seen the islands, danced at midnight, and weathered some mighty storms. Back on shore, scrawled email addresses on menus are quickly lost in a stack of maps and receipts.

Our friends lived all over the Bay Area. We drove an hour to get together. Many of them didn’t know one another, therefore we never belonged to a tribe. Hardly ever did I run into friends by chance. When cars stalled in traffic on the bridge, I thought of the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989; I imagined the cables starting to sway back and forth, my car sailing through the air and into the water below. My list lengthened: reservations weeks in advance to the hot restaurants, long lines for movies, more traffic. I’d lived with those things for years and they didn’t bother me, then suddenly they did. Blame it on Tuscany. Living in a place with an intense sense of community made me want that all the time. Blame it on the bad fairy who prophesied at my birth: You will be restless.

San Francisco changed from being the place of my best opportunities, the
only
place I could live in America, the most beautiful city, to being
always cold
. Soothing cool fog became
dreary
. (Now I often long for bracing sea air, and the lowing sound of the foghorns, and the flashes of blue-blue views, and that flip your stomach makes when you nosedive over the crest of forty-five-degree hills, and my worldly-wise friends, all of whom knew we’d lost our senses when we left.)

Ed quit, too. Our time in Tuscany had activated his farming genes, and he wanted land. He mentioned a tractor. My
daughter always loved her visits to Georgia and longed for a big change. My conversion moment in Oxford reawakened a longing to breathe southern air. That felt sure and right.

Pin the tail on the donkey—if you can move anywhere, where will that be? Flying into North Carolina, we saw a sea of green. We lighted in the middle of that vast forested expanse, once again looking for home.

In the earliest stories, after the quest, the hero finds his way home. I never intended to do that, and even now I won’t say it’s permanent. My philosophy is
stare attento
, stay attentive, beware. I may spend my last years in a pied-à-terre in Montreal or a pink cottage in New Orleans. The most pitiable spirits in Dante’s hell are those unable to move out of their assigned circle.
Stare attento
—always look for the next circle to jump to.
Mother, may I? Yes, take three butterfly twirls and one leap
. I’m back on the land I came from, and moss-draped nostalgia plays (almost) no part; the South I fled was hard to boil, hard to eat.

By returning, I just wanted to place my hand on the cool clay earth.

At Chatwood, on a rusted nail, I find a key labeled
BANDING ROOM
, and wonder how the ornithologist Dr. Watkins who lived here in the 1950s netted the birds, and how he secured a place name on their legs. No one who moved here after him discarded his test tubes, his small bottles of desiccated insects,
or his tiny jars of thread. As for Mrs. Watkins, I’m tending her seventy-year-old garden and scouring the Internet to find replacements for her rare French roses as they die off. Many are no-name roses that she found in cemeteries and falling-down farms. From her hand-drawn maps I can see her sense of order and how she wanted to live in garden rooms. If I were inclined, I might look to glimpse her, knocking a copperhead off the brick wall, or leaning down to inhale the perfume of her Louise Odier. The house smells like a Tuscan stone church opened only for Easter. The great walnuts lining the driveway must have preceded her. Why would anyone plant them near a garden? Didn’t they know that the roots seep out a noxious chemical that withers most plants within fifty feet? I don’t have the heart to cut them down, and I’ll guess that Mrs. Watkins didn’t, either. I just hope not to meet my fate with a conk on the head by one of those little bombs.

Fragrances, wisps, fragments linger in an old place.
Ubi sunt; ubi nunc
—where are they; where now, those who came before us? Roman tomb inscriptions, and an abiding theme of poets. Under the walnut trees, I dig up the stones of a path that leads nowhere. A fallen springhouse cools no buttermilk. A pen houses no goats. An allée of rusty cedars approaches no house. There’s no water to reflect your face in the bottom of the old well. Faintly visible on the attic door: Wesley’s office. In a closet, a handmade hanger holds no coat. In the woods, my neighbor shows me a tombstone. Malley, age twelve now
for fifty years, fell from the gristmill window, landing on rocks near the waterwheel. Daffodils bloom in loud clumps. Beside him, his mother’s grave is unmarked. Did she plant the bulbs? She died of grief, a suicide. The dog leaps into the pond and emerges, shaking off water.

These discoveries of the memory of the land at Chatwood started to work as memory prompts for my early history, long pushed aside. (Yes, even repressed.) As I walk the path skirting the gristmill, through woods and across the cornfield, an outbreak of quartz, a clutch of blue bachelor’s buttons, a hunter’s hut, a swath of lupine, even a buzzard eating carrion, can arouse a hundred images from my past. Turn the kaleidoscope a quarter inch and shards of memory rearrange and shift, bright as ever.

Simultaneously, the present merges with the heady rush of memory sensations. I’m worrying about getting a tick. What looks like wild kale sprouts along the edge of the field, and, oh, poison ivy crawling up the pine tree. Daisies, Queen Anne’s lace, pretty yellow weeds—if I’d brought scissors, I could take home a bouquet.

The stream I step across on mossy stones surges toward the pond that falls toward the mill. Water still rushes where the wheel last turned. Four turtles line up on a log, ready to dive.

When we moved from California to North Carolina, I found in a box, unopened for many years, a cache of true primary material—childhood diaries, high school scrapbooks, a reading log, letters, and photographs. How solemn I look at thirteen in a white evening dress, dancing with Clifton MacDuffie. Wrist corsages gone to powder smear the brittle pages. A childish handwriting turns into a prim cursive. My father in
his
chair—so ordinary, just reading the newspaper. In the red diary with a lock, I endlessly obsess on possible romances.
I really like Monroe
. And
Jeff thinks I like him
. And often,
I’m not sure who to like
. Then I come upon
My daddy died today. That sounds cold blooded. I don’t know what to say
. The words are plain in this little diary. Odd that so much chaotic memory is banked up behind them.

What was it really like down in the belly of the beast so long ago?

In another box, I faced a stack of student poems, teaching
evaluations, mission statements I once spent weeks writing, and copies of letters to the dean when I was department chair—call the shredder service! Finally I unearthed a folder, also from the 1990s, of autobiographical pieces that I wrote and then stowed away. Not that I could forget them.

Growing up in Fitzgerald, I lived in an intense microcosm, where your neighbor knows what you’re going to do even before you do, where you can recognize a family gene pool by the lift of an eyebrow, or the length of a neck, or a way of walking. What is said, what is left to the imagination, what is denied, withheld, exaggerated—all these secretive, inverted things informed my childhood. Writing the stories that I found in the box, I remember being particularly fascinated by secrets kept in order to protect someone from who
you
are. That protection, sharpest knife in the drawer, I absorbed as naturally as a southern accent. At that time, I was curious to hold up to the light glimpses of the family that I had so efficiently fled. We were remote—back behind nowhere—when I was growing up, but even so, enormous social change was about to crumble foundations. Who were we, way far South? “We’re south of everywhere,” my mother used to lament.

What I’d aimed for was an homage to the place and people I sprang from. When I first read creation myths in anthropology class, I identified with the story of the deity who slapped into shape humans from local mud.

Writing those pieces, I’d fallen in love with prose. Each day was like holding on to a horse that bolted the barn. I wanted the southern
words
I’d missed in California. Teeninny, cussed out,
pray tell, cut the light, mash that bug, hired out, greased lightning, yo-ho, dogtrot, snake boots, done did, doodly-squat, belle-hood, fixing to, take ahold, chirrun, barking mad, young’uns, hie, I swan. I wanted to glue on my notebook the silty creeks, the drifts of Queen Anne’s lace, the brackish water in ponds covered with hyacinths, the crape myrtle’s dusty pink flowers that felt like the skin on my grandmother’s neck. Memory—a rebel force, a synesthesia that storms the senses. At age ten, as I’m weaving a hat from palmetto fronds, our cook Willie Bell says, “Flies can fly right through the blue in stained glass,” just as a deer outside the window touched his tongue to the ends of wet pine needles. Memory—like that.

Names of people came back: Fussie, Son Junior, Hannibal, Buddy Man, Halloween, Cusetta Mix, Dimple Harden, Dynamite, and my all-time favorite, Sugar Marie Jo Harriet. All southern writers have to be drawn to the eccentric language of the South, the rhythmic loops of the narrative, wild metaphors and hyperbole, larger-than-life figures in local legends, the still-alive folktale pattern of telling three incidents in order to illustrate a point. Writing reminded me of archery at camp: the hard pullback on the string, the dead level aim, the propulsion of the release, the
thunk
of contact with the straw-stuffed target, even the sting on my left inner arm if I had not the proper rotation.

Back then, when I published a few pieces in literary magazines, no one in the Mayes clan was enthusiastic, to say the very least.

My good girl training was long and rigorous. I have a small family. Did I want a rift? No. I shoved the essays into a folder; I moved them to “archive” on my computer files. I went back to writing poetry and buried the collection I called
Under Magnolia
. Anytime I felt the impulse to start my southern opus again, I instead headed for a movie or a new Thai restaurant. I’d go jogging or read a novel until the impulse faded. I wrote books of poetry, a college textbook. I was busy with my teaching, busy, busy, raising a daughter and squeezing writing into the cracks.

Did my relatives fear
Peyton Place
with a drawl and a plateful of grits? I stalled as I internalized their voices. I admired my friend Molly Giles, who, when asked how she could write frankly about her family, quickly replied, “Well, that’s what God gave them to me for.” Parents should be careful, we agreed—they may be raising a writer in the house. Little Sissie mentally takes notes as the father yanks down the draperies and the mother weeps and rolls her hair on orange juice cans.

My California-bred daughter loved the family stories, and said, “You
must
write about them.” She always has been fascinated by the South, by the talk, talk, talk, the symphonic movements of conversations that diverge and go back and pick up, reach denouement, and continue to crescendo.