Sitting Up With the Dead: A Storied Journey Through the American South. Pamela Petro
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by comparison.
I had met Vickie on the Internet, and she’d invited me to her home in Forsyth, Georgia, before she had stopped to consider whether I might be an axe-murderess. Later she told me she had been worried.
Forsyth is in Georgia red clay country, where the earth swells and bucks under the farmland. When exposed it is the color of raw beef; and on dry days, like this one, a haze hovers above the roadsides like rusty fog.
Vickie lived outside town in one of the quiet places I had been fretting about missing on the Interstate. To reach it I drove along a secondary road past woods and fields until I came to her signpost: an old barn half-consumed by trees. It would have had the look of a Dutch landscape etching but for the corrugated iron roof, which was painted with enormous letters that read, ‘See Beautiful Rock City.’ Or, as Vickie had warned, ‘See Beautif Rock Cit,’ because some of the iron slats had recently fallen off. Rock City is a kind of giant-scale rock garden in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Barns all over the South once advertised it, though Vickie’s is now one of the few that remain, making it a legitimate Southern icon.
Her farmhouse and out-buildings artfully married wrought and found, decay and care, in a way that suggested a relaxed appreciation of the visual world. Vickie kicked at the red dirt and said that the difference between ‘home’ – Wilkinson County, not far to the south – and ‘here’ – Monroe County, where her husband was from – was that the earth in Wilkinson County was white and chalky. ‘This,’ she said, scuffling it again with her foot, ‘is just red dirt.’
Vickie’s house was nicely cluttered, but her ‘office’, which was really a nook just wide enough to stand sideways in, looked more like an experiment in sedimentary rock formation than any part of an ordinary household. Her desk and bookshelves were barely visible, overlain by strata of photographs, trinkets and souvenirs, scattered overtop with scribbled notes and sheets of paper. The effect was of a secular altar, which it may very well have been. I peered into one photograph and met the eyes of an old lady who seemed as aware of me as I was of her. She had a neat nest of white hair, severe black-framed glasses, blue eyes, and a crumpled mouth set in a straight line. ‘Granny Griffin,’ said Vickie. ‘All cleaned up.’
I had been eager to meet Vickie, ever since I had learned she told stories in the character of her grandmother, but especially keen after phoning her the previous evening from my motel room. Rarely in the course of chatty conversations do people bother to dredge their hearts and intellects for their deepest opinions, especially on difficult subjects like race or religion. It’s too hard, and most people are out of practice in the discipline of thinking, much less translating thought to speech. Yet the latter skill had been Vickie’s inheritance, and in between giving me directions to her barn and laughing over the urban legends of the Internet, she had spoken like a true child of Faulkner’s talk-besotted South. ‘The North–South thing isn’t real anymore. It’s dangerous to perpetuate that stuff. But there are differences. The South carries a deep kind of pain, and the North a sense of moral duty. Both can cripple a person, or a family. Or a country, I guess.’ On race she was upbeat: ‘Look, we’re still a young country, we’ll work it out. We have to find a big porch to sit on and tell each other stories, and not try to solve everything immediately … You know, I grew up with black kids and we loved each other. We still do. Why don’t people ever talk about that?’
The following morning, in her living room, over an hour and a half, Vickie did something I didn’t expect. Instead of distilling her conclusions for me, she verbally recreated the world in which she had formed them. It was like taking a crash course in someone else’s life.
This strange new universe began with its people: Granny Griffin was tall, had big feet, and wore support hose held in place with rubber bands just above the knee; Daddy Runt, her husband, who was extremely short; Jesse H, Vickie’s father, was famous in the family for pointing at you with his middle finger. (Vickie squinted, scowled, and jabbed at the air: ‘Now you listen to me …’). There was Ladonia Griffin, Daddy Runt’s mother, whom Granny loathed, calling her ‘Old Lady Doughknee Griffin’. And Aint Hattie, Daddy Runt’s sister, whom Granny also disliked. Granny had been born a Kitchen – pronounced Keet’chun – ‘I weren’t born no Griffin,’ she’d remind Vickie. The Kitchens were mean as snakes, but it was another branch of the family that, according to Granny, ‘had let the meanness in the door.’ Everyone on Granny’s side of the family was ‘peculiar’. As Granny said about one of her sons, ‘one more inch and he’d be over.’
All these people (‘I hate that you can’t meet them!’ cried Vickie several times), lived on the same street: Harberson Walker Road, known in the family for unexplained reasons as Habersham Walker Road (Granny and Daddy Runt could ‘kinda sorta read,’ said Vickie). Across the way was the Mixon’s cotton field, which ‘Old Man Mag’ plowed with a mule. Granny feuded with Eva Mixon as well. ‘She didn’t hate the Mixons,’ said Vickie. ‘It’s more that she saw through the outer crust of them – what they were trying to be versus who she KNEW them to be.’ Granny’s insights didn’t stop her from retaliating, however, when Eva took drastic measures to protect her chicken coop. ‘They killed each other’s dogs and chickens under cover of night and poison,’ Vickie explained.
Granny ate hog brains with a cut-up onion for breakfast, and put soda in her tea to make it black. She ‘had a hard opinion on religion’. She liked country churches, which taught you to be more scared of God than the Devil, but ‘she had no inhibitions with God. She could talk to him anywhere, it didn’t have to be in church.’ Granny believed that the first thing that happened when you died was that you went blind. The incentive in becoming a ghost was to come back and ‘take a peek at something familiar’, but since ghosts couldn’t see they bumped into things and scared you. Turpentine and kerosene made into a poultice kept them away.
Jesse H (the H stood for Hamm) had come from a family of tenant farmers – Granny had a hard opinion on them, too, ‘cause they wuz high-falutin’ – but her own family worked in the Kaolin mines (Kaolin is a wet, white, sticky clay used to make chalk). Daddy Runt, who had made moonshine whisky during the Depression but never drank a drop, had a talent for charming honeybees. He began each morning by pulling up peanuts (they grow underground on the roots of peanut plants), then put in a full day at the chalk mine, went fishing in the chalk pond, cleaned and ate the fish, and spent summer evenings shelling peas.
‘Now, none of us was gonna starve in 1960,’ said Vickie, ‘but we still had to put up food for winter as if our lives depended on it.’ Granny, Daddy Runt and Jesse H – who was the oldest of ten children and near to his in-laws in age – carried the stresses of the Depression, ‘When eatin’ was a privilege’, into Vickie’s childhood. Every night in summer the whole family sat on the front porch and shucked peas, butter beans and corn. Besides being useful, shucking accomplished two goals: it insured Granny’s admonition that, ‘There ain’t no good young ‘un unless it’s a tired young ‘un,’ and it provided an opportunity for storytelling.
‘It was ungodly hot, shelling all those peas,’ recalled Vickie. ‘Southern heat: it’s a cross between you and the weather. It has an attitude about it. Ignorance, immaturity and devastation are all mixed in there, because you had to function in it. It was never just a hot night, but what you brought to that hot night. Like resentment. What made it bearable were the stories and songs. Otherwise it was just like a black drape over you.’
Often as she spoke, tilting her head back, closing her eyes, and reaching out with both hands, as if she were conducting an invisible family choir, Vickie would say ‘Now hold it a minute, let me get this just right.’ I imagined her childhood as a great jigsaw puzzle in her head, stored in pieces, and that she would rather be tortured than not give me a perfect verbal model of each one, so I could grasp the big picture (a critical challenge, as that big picture is fast fading from the Southern landscape).
Vickie spoke sadly of the people she’d known as a child not realizing that they sat on top of the largest chalk deposit in the world. Now she had a precious resource of her own – memories of her childhood amongst these people – but the difference was that she fully grasped its value. I had an uncanny feeling that she had intuited the worth of