Sitting Up With the Dead: A Storied Journey Through the American South. Pamela Petro
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high spirits had sometimes crossed the line into violence; her powers of perception were honed young, reading signs in people’s behavior so as to be on the lookout for trouble, the better to avoid it.)
Now it had become her God-given responsibility to bring this vanished world and its prickly inhabitants into the present, without letting them fall into caricature. ‘I’ll die before I let Granny Griffin get plucked out of context by someone,’ she warned, ‘and turned into Granny Clampit [from The Beverly Hillbillies].’
By this time my hand – from taking notes – and my head were both aching, but Vickie’s obsession was infectious. I felt as if I were attending the birth of a storyteller as she painfully translated the particular, the personal, the people whose breath she had felt, into characters whose lives were no longer composed of strings of disconnected incidents, but were in the process of taking on larger meanings. ‘Until 1997, when I started performing, I saw ’em as real people, y’know, who they really were. Now they’re dramatized. If it’s not actually her [Granny] on stage, the audience at least has to recognize the idea of her.’
That idea conveys Vickie’s feelings about age, among other things. ‘Granny was old. And being old was a privilege.’ Not just for the elderly, who had survived, but for the youngsters who lived with them. Age connected worlds, tethered vanished relatives and their strange ways to everyday life. Old people took up the domestic overflow, could be counted on to be at home even when parents weren’t. They were a safe harbor in a tough world: something she considered most kids to be without these days, which is one reason she decided to give the children of central Georgia a communal grandmother.
Vickie had originally tried to write about Granny and her clan for a local newspaper, but repeatedly felt tugged back to the verbal. She found she’d had to make tapes and then painstakingly transcribe them to get at the spelling of Granny’s dialect. ‘Sand bed’ wasn’t what Granny had said, when she was yelling at the kids to sweep up the chalky dust in her front yard; it was say’nd beyd. Without hearing Granny, even when her voice is filtered through the eyes, her stories leak into the modern ‘anywhere’ world of Standard English. Dialect, according to Vickie, is a place marker, and maybe a marker in time as well; without it, the gulf between Granny’s world and ours narrows, and the truth, she said, is that they are not at all contiguous.
Once she decided that sound was more important than words, Vickie started telling stories at the local library in the character of Daddy Runt. ‘It was at Christmas. I decided to show the children the way Daddy Runt did his Christmas tree. He’d a cut a pine saplin’, then pull every needle off that poor thing. Then he’d dig a hole in the corner of the yard, set it in there, and wrap light bulbs – though he’d call ’em leyt boolbs – around every limb. Granny and I would sit on the porch and watch him. She had an eye for humor, struck through with a big vein of cynicism. Since she couldn’t control Daddy Runt, she’d give him a hard time. “Jus look at that poor-ass pine tree,” she’d say, “that thang’s as bald as Old Man Brown.”’
After a few incarnations as Daddy Runt, Vickie decided the costume was too hot, and switched to Granny. Instead of simultaneously portraying and narrating every move her grandfather made – self-narration had been a longstanding habit of his – she became Granny, and in character would describe what Daddy Runt had done to that poor tree, and then take on the shortcomings of almost everyone in Wilkinson County, and in neighboring Twiggs, Bib and Baldwin Counties as well. ‘My daddy’s family was strong-willed and aggressive, but Granny was obstinate. As you probably already know from just knowing people, period’ – she looked at me and I nodded hesitantly – ‘the outgoing fellers in life who talk big just slam into a stone wall when they come face to face with a passive-aggressive – emphasis on passive. Granny called it “bide’n her time”. She’d ugh-huh and ugh-huh (that means fake it), grimace and gesture when the ‘greats’ from Daddy’s family were around. But, later, she’d say, “Ooooh-wee, listen heah. Them Roberts ain’t nothin’ but trash. Heah they all come up the highway from Ocilla like a band’a gypsies, thankin’ Macon, Georgia was Somewhere. Back then Macon wut’n nothin’ – a one-trawf waterin’ hole maybe fer a tired mule, but’je Granny, heah, she ain’t got nothin’ in her heart fer Macon or nobody out’a Macon, includin’ them Collins’ses and that bunch’a Hamms. They ain’t nothin’ but talk. Granny could whup ’er one of ’em if she took the notion.”’
When I said Vickie became Granny, I meant it. Even without the costume – she’d shown me a picture of herself in a long dress, apron and bonnet, the bottom edges and corners of her mouth smudged with brown eye-shadow to imitate snuff stains – sitting in her air-conditioned living room on a sunny June morning, in her fashionable summer dress, fingernails and toenails painted bright red, Vickie Vedder became Granny Griffin. She scrunched her face, fixed her eyes wide, never once taking her pupils off mine. Her voice came out high and scratchy, like the ragged end of a rook’s cry, sustained and riding on a fast, cocky trot of vowels and consonants – utterly different from any other sound I’d heard her make. When she finished a particularly pithy phrase she’d make a kind of ‘put-that-in-your-pipe-and-smoke-it’ S curve with her head and shoulders, dropping the left one, raising the right, following it up with her left jaw, and ending with a cock of the right eyebrow. Now and then she’d splice in a mannerism of her father’s – the middle finger in the ‘know-it-all’ position – for extra emphasis. The effect was mesmerizing. The old lady was smart and funny, but because she had been so quickly conjured to life in a pretty, young body, I was too amazed (and a little alarmed) to laugh.
I stumbled into downtown Forsyth at an extreme ebb tide. I wasn’t depressed – on the contrary, I found Vickie elating – just utterly depleted. The town looked settled in its well-to-do ways, and baked pale in the mid-day heat. I parked in the shadow of the Monroe County Courthouse, a ponderous Victorian comment on law and order in red brick, topped by an Islamic-looking dome, which sat smack in the middle of town and effectively quartered Main Street into a square. Then I wandered into Russell’s Pharmacy to buy a pen (Vickie’s talk had used up my ink) and found that the Russells also ran a sandwich shop next door, with an old-fashioned ice cream counter and wrought iron tables and chairs. The funny thing was that each chair and table foot was covered in a slit-open, neon-yellow tennis ball. The effect against the otherwise black and white floor was surreal, as though it had been decorated by Magritte. I hoped the floor had recently been waxed, but I never found out.
A friendly woman at the counter offered me a pimento and cheese sandwich with extra mayonnaise, a combination I’d never heard of but Southern friends consider a kind of holy food, and coaxed me into a Coke float to go with it. I could barely understand her accent; in fact, she had to repeat ‘pimento’ several times before I got it. All of her words seemed glued together.
As carbohydrates and sugar rekindled my brain cells, I remembered what had been nagging at me all morning: Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s classic study, Honor and Violence in the Old South. One of the cornerstones of Wyatt-Brown’s argument stressed the honor code of the antebellum South: the idea that Southern morality was based on honor, a public virtue conferred by the community, as opposed to the self-regulating morality of private conscience, and that, consequently, slavery could function without contradiction in such a world, because honor required its opposite – abasement – in order to have value. The public element of this system intrigued me. When virtue is an external construct, an individual must base his self-worth on the opinions of others; no space is sanctioned for the consolation of private dignity. As Wyatt-Brown wrote, ‘public factors establishing personal worth conferred particular prominence on the spoken word and physical gesture as opposed to interior thinking or writing.’ He went on to add that, at heart, the ‘archaic concept that thought itself was a form of speaking’ had not died out in the pre-war South.
Thinking as a form of speaking remains a self-perpetuating legacy in parts of the South, or at least it did during Vickie’s childhood in Gordon, Georgia. If I had learned anything from her that was alien to my experience in America, it was precisely this. I wrote and Vickie talked. ‘My family is predisposed to talk,’ she had said, laughing, ‘and maybe think.’ Speech not only brought Granny Griffin back to life, it triggered something very