Sitting Up With the Dead: A Storied Journey Through the American South. Pamela Petro
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cylinders to prevent it breaking, then re-heated to be stretched flat and cut (which is why there are so often bubbles in old glass); that Zoe’s mother’s name was Philoquia; that Hattie had a Yankee grandmother from Nashua, New Hampshire. I saw chests stuffed with muffs and boas and velvet hats from winters long past, and a desk of Georgia pine that had survived a fire in Arizona, the heat from which had resurrected long-dormant insects which woke, gnawed, and gave a fabulously ornate burling to the wood.
Hattie showed me the pink satin ‘Southern belle’ dress she wears for summer tours. I asked if it had been specially made. She burst out laughing, glanced conspiratorially around, and whispered loudly, ‘Forty dollars, off the rack. It’s a prom dress, from the Juniors department!’
Dan wanted me to look at his poetry. One poem was about a dog, another a sensitive meditation on the sky from his perspective as a fighter pilot in World War II. As we poured over his work, Dan knowing by heart what he could no longer see, Hattie turned on the radio and began a kind of private, swaying dance, singing along to ‘Summertime’ in a breathy alto. Then they wanted to take me out for fast food, but I was exhausted, and badly needed to make sense of my notes. Suddenly sad at the idea of leaving them alone in their beautiful temple, I ran to the car and fetched a crumpled bag of what Granny Griffin would have called sorry-lookin’ peaches that I’d bought earlier to give to Nancy Basket, and presented it instead to Dan and Hattie by way of thanks.
‘He didn’t bore me. That’s why I married Laddie,’ Hattie said as she saw me out. ‘It doesn’t do to be bored in life.’
The next day in the breakfast room of Madison’s Days Inn (set on a commercial strip a respectable distance from the historic downtown), I ate my Cheerios under an amateur watercolor of Rosehill. The contemporary painting imagined the house in pre Civil War days, with several Uncle Remus-looking figures toiling – they were too picturesque to be merely working – in front. Yesterday Dan Hicky had said that an old man, a former slave, had knocked on the door around the turn of the century and told his grandmother that the house used to have a balcony in the shape of a heart leading to a second story porch. The painting, however, portrayed mid-nineteenth-century Rosehill in its current incarnation, with a traditional porch stretched vertically across the façade. I felt smug for hours.
I also read a booklet Hattie had given me that she’d written about Madison – I was trying to avoid several elderly members of a bus tour who were holding bagels over their eyes like Lone Ranger masks – and learned two things: how to make ‘Georgia’s Coke-Cola [sic] Salad’ (red Jello, crushed pineapple, Bing cherries, cream cheese, and ‘two cans Coke-a-Cola’), and that the former owner of Cyclorama had lived in Madison. This was big news.
A house near the Hickys’ called Luhurst – another monument of white-clapboard respectability, with a wraparound porch – had once been home, appropriately, to Lula Hurst, who had an amazing talent. She could levitate people and objects. Her most famous feat was to stand on cotton scales and unaided hoist two grown men in a chair over her head while the scales showed only her own weight. Her father contacted Paul Atkinson, who chaperoned the Battle of Atlanta cyclorama around the country along with other marvels, and arranged for Lula to join the act. Before long, however, Paul and Lula were married, and moved back to Luhurst to levitate no more.
I STOPPED AMID THE BROAD-BACKED HILLS of Northeastern Georgia, not far from Walhalla, to get more peaches and a barbecued pork roll at a roadside shack that looked like it had been abandoned by a mobile flea market. The owner, squinting from beneath a battered Atlanta Braves cap, barked, ‘Girl, you got people in Georgia?’
I told him that close friends lived right over the Tennessee line, and he let it pass. ‘These here’re South Carolina peaches. Just so’s you know. Georgia peaches be runty right now.’ So much for the plump peach on Georgia license plates. I also bought some scuppernong preserves because I liked the name. Vickie said that Daddy Runt had made wine from ‘scuplins’,’ and I thought these might be the same thing (they were, but it took borrowing a dictionary to learn that scuppernongs are wild grapes, and scuplins’ one of Vickie’s family’s innumerable verbal shortcuts).
As the greenery rolled by I had the same curious feeling I’d had for days: that the South badly needed to comb its hair, metaphorically speaking. Mile after mile the tree and shrubscape along the roadsides was hopelessly tangled in kudzu, the plant Time Magazine had voted one of the worst ideas of the twentieth century. It was easy to see why. Kudzu is a leafy vine that was first introduced to the South from Japan in 1876, then promoted with gusto in the Thirties, with the idea that it would prevent soil erosion and provide shade. The problem is, in optimum conditions – for instance, the climate of the American Southeast – kudzu grows up to a foot a day, and eventually smothers every object in its path. In seventy years it has crept everywhere, turning stands of mature trees into wild, giant topiary gardens. Imagine if Christo, the artist who wrapped the Reichstag in cloth, decided to cover the entire state of Georgia in very high pile, green carpeting: it would look exactly like the work of kudzu.
I made up a sport called kudzu-spotting, which is similar to cloud-gazing, though earthbound. The dense green masses take on all kinds of shapes: bears, swooping eagles, several species of dinosaur, all leashed together like shaggy green circus animals. The idea is to spot them while driving at 70 mph without having an accident (I narrowly avoided two crashes that I can recall). Kudzu is so universally despised that it has become a sub-genre of Southern chit-chat to bash it. Everybody hates kudzu … everybody except Nancy Basket. Nancy makes paper out of it. She told me on the phone that she’s also built a kudzu barn in her backyard.
‘The leaves talk to me; they told me to use them.’ Nancy said, sounding like she meant it.
Oh great, I thought, even the kudzu talks.
We were sitting in what I’d call Nancy’s Native American room, though her whole house may have been similarly decorated. I had arrived late, having been stuck on a two-lane highway behind a behemoth thresher, or some other ungodly large piece of farm equipment, and in my rush, hadn’t glanced at the rest of her house. An animal skin was thrown over the sofa on which we both sat, curled up on our respective feet, and her daughter’s Cherokee dancing outfit hung on the back of a door near an American flag, the latter superimposed with the image of a Native American man in full headdress. Antlers, feathers, animal skulls, and beaded necklaces were scattered along the mantlepiece of a large, fieldstone fireplace. It was a comfortable room, earthy, with soft, overstuffed furniture – the very antithesis of Rosehill – and Nancy suited it. She wore her hair in a long black braid; bare feet poked out from under the hem of her denim skirt.
There were baskets everywhere.
‘I’ll explain later why I went to the kudzu for help,’ Nancy said. ‘But the baskets come first.’
Nancy had been born in Washington State, but moved to South Carolina ten years ago after learning how to weave and braid baskets in the early eighties. Shortly after her apprenticeship a great uncle had contacted her out of the blue, sending hitherto unknown information about her third-great grandmother, Margaret Basket, a Cherokee basket weaver who had been born in Virginia. Margaret had been one of thousands of Cherokee forced westward along the Trail of Tears, after white settlers drove them from their homes. (I thought uneasily of Rosehill. Hattie Hicky had told me the day before that one of the branches of the Trail of Tears had passed just in front of the house; it later became the Charleston-to-New Orleans stagecoach route. ‘We ran the Indians out of heah,’ she’d stated, characteristically telescoping past and present with her free use of pronouns.)
‘When a young Native American woman shows promise as a basket-maker,’ Nancy continued, ‘out of respect she takes the name of the ancestor who’s helped her in her art.’ Which is why – encouraged by her uncle’s intervention and a timely divorce – she became Nancy Basket.
The stories grew out of her basketry. After she got to Walhalla, Nancy continued her apprenticeship with Native American artists in Cherokee, North Carolina, just across the state line. ‘They told me stories as