Sitting Up With the Dead: A Storied Journey Through the American South. Pamela Petro
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Vickie paused to consider her grandmother. ‘From what I could tell about Granny,’ she explained, ‘is that as she aged, she began creating a private world of thought. She actually didn’t like her in-laws, her husband, the neighbors; a lot of the community style also didn’t jive with her natural inclinations to be a loner. Family life crowded in on her thoughts, and I feel like Daddy Runt was a “too busy” person to talk through things with her. This was observable from anyone watching them live out their lives.’
Vickie’s observation was made for my sake: it was the result of public display, of having an audience. It was, literally, thought as a form of speech. In North Toward Home, Willie Morris said there was something ‘spooked-up and romantic’ about a small town childhood in the South, which he attributes in part to growing up in a place where reading books was unacceptable. The imagination had to work itself out somehow, he said, and that was usually through talk, the endless telling of tales. In a rural world without access to other means of preservation – today Vickie mourns the fact that she never had a camera as a child – talk was both a family legacy and the means to a kind of private immortality. On countless summer evenings, shelling peas on the porch, Vickie’s living relatives made the dead as familiar as Old Man Mag, Eva Mixon and the mule, but as they spoke, they were in turn laying down their own investment in Vickie’s memory, for now she tells stories about the way they told stories.
‘I think my Granny Griffin, Daddy Runt, Daddy, Mama, and all their relatives have actually become characters and stories unto themselves,’ Vickie had said. ‘That’s because their storytelling styles, their lifestyles, and their mannerisms … are what’s worth knowing about them. It’s not what they said; it’s how they were affected by what they were saying, the people they thought of to remember … And it became a joy to the living members of our huge family to sit and listen to stories about the dead members and how they had acted when they were alive … To hear my daddy talk about the Collins family was funnier than actually knowing a Collins … All by himself, he could take you back to the spot where it all happened, so we were taken into his mind, and we loved him and his voice and how he raised his big old hands, his grin … He would say, “I can’t tell ye another word, I’m s’tickled by that crazy Ethel Collins. If her Mama had know’d what that gal was doing …” And on he’d go. And it was as if the whole clan, the whole farm, the whole scene was still important.’
My grandmother had only waved to me in silence in my dream-memory of the slides. Vickie’s grandmother had done one better: she had come alive again and spoken to me that very morning. In Vickie’s experience the past lived through speech. Granny Griffin was inside her and could come out at her bidding, because when she had really been alive they had talked. Granny had lived next door and talked to Vickie and through a constant funnel of stories had lent her not only her own life, but the lives of hundreds of other relatives stretching back down the ages. My family, by contrast, had shared landscapes – the beach at Cape Cod, Nantucket Sound and the big jetty where we’d fished into countless blue twilights – and it was into these places that we had spilled our love. They and the images we took of them silently testified that we had been happy together. They were our stories. But when we were pictured within them, waving or not, it was almost as icons of age or gender or some other universal attribute, like pleasure: Smiling Young Girl in Seascape; Heroic Man Fishing on Jetty. We individuals kept our narratives battened inside as silent memories, held close but not mythologized into family stories. Places glued us together but they were not wells into which we poured our spoken history, as Vickie’s family poured their words into Georgia.
Vickie and I are almost the same age; we both grew up in the 1960s. But whereas my memory is infiltrated with public television and private photographs – images concurrent with my childhood – Vickie, who grew up without a television set, remembers stories with roots trailing back into the deep, deeper, deepest past. What does it mean that I had lived in the suburban North, and Vickie in the rural South? Does it mean anything at all? I didn’t have answers yet, so I scribbled these questions on a napkin smeared with pimento-cheese, and very much hoped I’d figure them out before the end of my pilgrimage, two months later, in the bayous of Louisiana.
‘Where ya from?’ asked the woman at the counter.
‘Rhode Island,’ I guessed, hoping I’d understood the question. For good measure I complimented her on the Coke float.
‘You didn’t get that accent in Rhode Island,’ said a voice behind me. ‘There’s London in that voice.’
I was floored. LaMar Russell, owner of Russell’s Pharmacy, had read the invisible pedigree of my speech and found Wales in it (he thought it was London, but from the perspective of central Georgia, they’re close enough). It was uncanny. The thing is, I don’t think I have a discernible British accent; in fact most people think I’m from Virginia. I explained that I had gone to the University of Wales for graduate school, and had come to love the country so much that I often woke up astonished that I continued to live and breathe without the Welsh landscape and language. LaMar looked triumphant. The only other people to have spotted rogue signposts in my American diction were a gas-meter reader in Rhode Island and an elderly couple at Gatwick Airport. In the midst of discussing the outrage of delayed flights, the woman had grasped my hand and with feeling told me how good it was to meet someone from home. ‘We’ve been travelling for five months,’ she enthused, ‘and you’re the very first fellow Tasmanian we’ve met!’
As I told this story to LaMar and the woman I couldn’t understand, it occurred to me that Vickie had never told me a story. I laughed out loud. I hadn’t noticed until then.
I CONTINUED ON A MORE OR LESS northerly route out of Forsyth. I had called a storyteller with the engaging name of Nancy Basket from a payphone in Cedar Key, and made an appointment to see her in Walhalla, South Carolina, the following afternoon. Walhalla is in the westernmost corner of the state, a region that has more in common with its hilly northern neighbors – North Carolina and Tennessee – than with the low country of coastal South Carolina. In fact it is officially part of Appalachia, and not a long drive from central Georgia. I had time to get there slowly.
What I really wanted was to get a pedicure. Vickie Vedder’s glamorous toenails had put the idea in my head. Besides, I thought, beauty parlors were probably breeding grounds for all kinds of local stories: what else can you do while your perm sets or nails dry but talk? Unfortunately, piney woods – I now understood why this phrase comes so easily to Southern songwriters – had the countryside in a vice-like grip, leaving towns few and far between. The first substantial one I came to was Monticello, where I stopped a noticeably well-coiffured blonde woman at another courthouse square, beneath another Islamic-domed edifice, and asked her about pedicures. She gave me convoluted directions to a little house outside town, with a hand-painted ‘Beauty Parlor’ sign out at the front.
‘No, sweetie,’ said the girl in the front room, between careful strokes of nail varnish, ‘we don’t do no ped-i-cures on Fridays. You’re outta luck.’
I went back to the Courthouse square to get my bearings, and just behind the spot where I’d questioned the woman earlier was another beauty parlor; I figured it must have been obscured by her minivan.
‘Don’t do nails. No toenails neither,’ responded the receptionist, who was wearing an old-fashioned, wraparound blue robe, hair glistening with gel. All the customers and hairdressers were black, and all were staring at me. ‘You not from here, girl, are you?’
Undaunted, I decided to try Madison, just up the road, where I parked on yet another sober, red-brick courthouse square, dominated by yet another cupola straight out of the Arabian Nights. I asked about beauty parlors in the chamber of commerce, and was told they’d all be closing about now.
While waiting my turn to talk to the woman behind the counter, I’d been fingering a book of Madison, Georgia matches – emblazoned with two messages: ‘The Town Sherman Refused to Burn’ and ‘For Safety Strike on Back’ – and reading the promotional material. Madison’s claim to fame was its thirty-five antebellum