Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir (6 page)

My mother and her friends laid swatches of fabric over sofas. They carried samples of peach, ivory, teal, and cream paint in their purses. They contemplated the recovered wing chair with the attention surgeons give to incisions. Pale peach is a good color, a lasting color; it never looks as if the chair has just been done. You never want the chair to appear just done. There are fine points: double welting, never tacks except on leather. The act of attention was intense and disciplined. The house must have a sense of itself. Greens and blues will fool you; you don’t remember shades as well as you think.

My mother wants color and polish and devotion. She wants the linens ironed and the windows clean. Fabric, stitching, tatting, piecing into designs, interfacing for durability and form.
Her friend Grace can see a dress on someone in Atlanta, go home, and cut the pattern out of newspaper. The methods are sound: hem by picking up the stitch, doubling back for it then going forward, around a circle, as in writing—the piercing bright words, the tension of the thread.

The network of women existed in a world as private as purdah. Among themselves, my mother’s friends were brutally frank, raucous, and never oblivious to compromise. Talk was of
should
, of standards, local gossip, and, at least five times a day, of how each person looked. Judging every nuance of appearance was part of our chromosomal makeup. They went out as if disguised by veils. Appearance. And feigned innocence, the vise that keeps women “girls” well into their sixties.

A generality may have a use, as does a bludgeon, but it obliterates what is of particular use by oversimplifying. Nothing has been dealt this blow so much as the southern woman, black and white. The power behind the throne, iron hand in velvet glove, she endured (what else could she do?), belle of three counties, a little vixen,
she’s like a member of the family
, a great lady, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, and all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

Every mother I knew could cook like the devil. There’s their
jouissance
, that fine, forgotten-in-English word. Pressed chicken, brown sugar muffins, quail (smothered), Sally Lunn bread, grits with cheese, a spectrum of pies with lemon meringue as the lowest, and black bottom as the epitome. Lane Cake (which
no Northerner could ever hope to emulate in this life or the next), and key lime when Mr. Bernhardt got in the Key West limes at his fruit stand. No matter what. Unconditionally, we will cook, from restorative broths to nutmeg custards to grand heroic meals.

The splendid matriarchs with power in the open were rare birds. And always endangered. More common is the third-rate power, manipulation. We learned it as we learned cartwheels and the multiplication table. I had my daddy wrapped around my little finger when I was five because I was “a pistol,” his “sweetheart and buddy.” We knew Scarlett could get Rhett back. “Blink your eyes slowly as you look up at a boy,” my mother instructs. “Don’t swim so much. You’ll get ugly muscles.” “Let
him
win the match.”

For what we later came to call “role models” of independent living, there were just the old maid ticket takers at the theater, the librarian with the gray bun, and the McCall sisters, who looked like twin bulldogs and taught first and third grades. “You must suffer for beauty,” my mother says as she curls my sister’s hair so tight her eyes are drawn sideways. “You’ll end up like
them
.” “Your brains are showing,” she tells me, as she smooths her eyebrows. “You’ll have teaching to fall back on,” she says later. Much of it took, like a big vaccination scab, leaving me well marked.

To be a woman was to own nightgowns softer than a peach-blow. Beneath the batiste and the trim of eyelet and smocking is the smear of blood, armpits smelling of dry herbs and resin,
a feather of hair, the sex like a patch of moss in the dark. To be a woman was to know the rooster foot is good for thickening, the cooter foot good in soup. If you scald claws until the tough skin and talons slip off, then you’ve got something.

Listening to women—playing bridge, shelling peas, visiting the dressmaker—those who were dead seemed present. Listening from just out of sight, I could imagine the person evoked to be rounding the corner, about to call out, instead of staring up for many years at the underside of a coffin lid shut by the Brothers Paulk. Talk, talk. Words as tactile as pebbles and bits of broken glass. Georgia has a fine, enunciated, lyrical gentry speech, a harsh, chopped-rock cracker speech, and the cane-syrup-rich deep black speech, with good stories from all.

An ancient black babysitter tells me stories about the “brownies” who could fly to Africa. “Now, you’re a brownie,” she says, “you just don’t know it.” The story thrills but scares me. Her smoky whites of eyes and little white tufts of hair stand out in the dim bedtime light. “You go to sleep, Brownie, or the brownies will take you off to Africa.” The other storyteller is the tubercular doctor next door, who sits me on his bony knees and tells me of a mythic eagle who grabs curly headed babies in its talons and flies. A soaring eagle, he gestures, meanwhile spitting brown juices that spatter on my legs.
It’ll take you into the North!
I am afraid of catching TB but too polite to wipe off my leg. Craggy, old yellowed eyes, a big suit he seemed to flap around in: He is the eagle.

Fitzgerald was ordered, one of the few planned towns in the country. Veterans from the North and South, who gathered in 1895, long after the War Between the States, devised a perfect grid with straight streets. Intersecting Central and Main streets are each two lanes wide, with islands of oaks and palms. On the grid, you could not be lost. When my grandfather was mayor, he named the town “the Colony City” because it was colonized by aging Confederate and Union soldiers looking for their balm in Gilead down in the southern pines. As in other colonies, the news seemed distant.

The streets running east and west are named after southern shrubs and trees: Jessamine, Cypress, Lemon, Pine, Magnolia; north and south streets are named for generals of the war: Lee, Grant, Johnston, Jackson, Sheridan, Longstreet, Sherman. The four borders are battleships: Monitor, Merrimac, Roanoke, and Sultana. The islands of palms, azaleas, and gardenias relieve the grid. Thirty feet of amaryllis my mother planted when I was small bloomed for decades on the island across from the Methodist church. Even the cemetery comes out of war memory. Named Evergreen, after the one at Gettysburg, the cemetery, both in terrain and design, recalls the gory battle where more than fifty thousand died. Our dead, too, lie in plots lining Emmitsburg Road, Seminary Ridge Road, Little Round Top Lane, Taneytown Road. Many of the soldier/settlers must have fought at Gettysburg and survived. Thirty years after the battle, the geography of the fallen was still on their minds.

As in most southern small towns, the black people lived around the edges in small, usually unpainted houses. At the
Grand Theatre, a “colored” entrance led those patrons up to the balcony. In the dark, fear of getting caught must have kept them from dropping things on us. Two water fountains stood side by side at the gas station: Colored and White. They had their own grammar and high schools. Separate but equal, we were told.
A thriving Jewish community owned the clothing and shoe stores. How did they journey to Fitz from Odessa, Romania, and Poland? As far as I can find, no history exists that tells how Abe Kruger from Russia made his way to tiny Fitzgerald, Georgia, across the globe, in 1911. He left a substantial amount in his will to buy Christmas presents for poor children. What had been the Methodist Episcopal church when my father attended as a boy became a synagogue for all the Jews across south Georgia. Sometimes when something astonished my father, he said, “Well, that beats the Jews.” His tone was one of admiration. A community cordiality existed; I’m not sure there was social mixing among the grown-ups but the few children were not singled out for anything negative, as far as I know. I played with the three Kaminski boys, all of whom were fun, in the vacant lot between my grandfather’s house and theirs. They were rich and their mother, with long hair and shawls, seemed exotic.

When my mother redecorates my room, she inadvertently gives me a new place to hide. In the corner space left when she placed the twin beds at right angles, she had a cabinet built, so that for each bed’s head, there was a place for a reading lamp. Below, she had a door built into the cabinet for extra storage. If I pull the
bed away, I can squeeze inside, reach out, and almost realign the bed. The door has to stay open a crack so that I can plug in my toy stove. Inside, the space measures about three feet by three feet. I can sit up on a folded blanket among my games and dolls and collections.

Uncle Wilfred saves his Antonio y Cleopatra cigar boxes for me and I leave them open in the sun until most of the pungent smell evaporates. I keep blue, amethyst, and green broken glass in one, arrowheads, buttons, beads, and rocks in others. In shoeboxes, I save paper dolls with costumes from around the world, and also postcards, seashells, and the tiny train cars I make from matchboxes.

For hours, for years, I hide, reading by flashlight. Through books I learn of other galaxies where girls drive convertibles and solve mysteries, and live in the Alps and eat fresh cheese. The first poem I learn is “The Land of Counterpane” from a book by Robert Louis Stevenson. I’m enthralled by the cozy pastel scene of the boy playing with soldiers when he was sick in bed, and by the closing line “the pleasant land of counterpane.” I figure out that the word means
bedspread
.

I have enough sense not to light candles. When my mother calls, I don’t come out. My stove is supposed to cook when its lightbulb heats up. Into a small frying pan I break an egg. For a long time, two or three chapters, nothing happens, then the edges begin to curdle. After another few chapters, the enclosed lightbulb begins to smell hot and nothing more happens to the egg. Finally, my mother raps her knuckles on the top. “Come out of there right this minute. You could suffocate in there.” Yes, well, I could suffocate out of here, too.

In my hideouts, I thrived. Without my protective coloring, I felt fully exposed to my wild parents. Every night was chaos. They shouted and slammed doors, roaring off in the car in the middle of the night. They acted out every bad play they invented. Dingbat fights began with the whereabouts of keys and bills. At bedrock, I sensed that my parents loved each other. I still feel that was true, still never have broken their code of relentless ornery behavior, the determination to stay in motion, spiders, continuing to spin out the same tensile thread.

Memory is capricious. I can look back and see decadence, old bigots, the constant racial slurs, the bores, the wild cards, the bighearted, the family album of alcoholics, the saints, the old aunt propped in a chair saying only “da-da,” the slow-motion suicides, but at four, six, ten, they loomed, powerful, not as types but as themselves. Among them, logic takes wing. There’s Aunt Hazel, whose soot-black hair left a shadowy print on cushions, telling me that she had to gather her twenty beaux to the front porch of Daddy Jack’s house to announce her selection of the one to marry. I glance over at Wilfred,
numero uno
, with the enormous wart on the side of his nose, as he nods over the Sunday paper. More helpfully, she tells me, out of lifelong idleness, “Never learn to type. If you learn, you’ll have to do it.

“And no cooking,” she adds.

Years later my friend with the perfect family wrote me, “I would not have you believe that we were not happy.” She’s still puzzling out the moment her father shot himself at his office.
That act still snags in my memory, a log fallen in a river that catches debris. No way to reconcile Paul in his armchair, teasing us, and Paul lifting the gun to his temple. Another friend came home from school to discover his mother in the kitchen, bullet through the mouth. Gingerbread on the counter and teeth stuck in the ceiling. I’m stuck on that image, too, and the barbed notion that seeming years of perfection perpetually will be mocked. What did all that good father’s gentleness mean? Why did we churn all that ice cream? Mystery. The seven veils, the eleven subjects for writing, the ten thousand things. There were other suicides, too, among them my other best friend’s mother—another gun to the head out on the patio—but a story can sustain only so many examples. My mother claimed that Fitzgerald had the highest suicide rate in the country. “And no wonder,” she added.