This is clear from notes he made for his unfinished autobiography. Summoning memories more than half a century after the fact, he could still smell the brimstone and would shudder. His was “an old-line fundamentalist Southern Baptist church,” he wrote, “a kind that identified itself in those days with a line in gold letters across the top of the announcement-box in the yard in front of it: WE PREACH JESUS CHRIST CRUCIFIED RISEN AND COMING AGAIN.” Each week Mitchell attended both Sunday school and the regular service, occasionally returning Sunday night for yet more worship. “By the time I was an adolescent I was so familiar with hell that I began to have nightmares,” he said, going on to recall riveting, if at times terrifying, preachers at revival. He remembered one in particular who dropped to his knees in front of the congregation as he impersonated a hapless sinner consigned to hell and begging for a drop of water. Then the preacher was suddenly on his feet again and playing the role of Satan, jabbing at the wretch with his imaginary pitchfork and reminding him that he didn’t think about the consequences “when you spent entire Sundays lying on the riverbank drunk, did you?”
For young Mitchell, hell was no abstract concept but a real place of eternal torment and cruelty. It’s hardly unusual for weighty matters of belief to occupy an intelligent child, but evidence suggests they really preyed on Mitchell’s mind. He recalled in particular one childhood discussion with his mother, prompted by the emotional funeral of a family friend. Afterward, the son quizzed his mother on heaven and hell—what they were, where they were—in a colloquy that segued into the larger concept of God. Betty Mitchell patiently tried to answer his questions, until he had her mildly exasperated, in the way that only astutely inquisitive children can exasperate a parent. Finally she moved to foreclose further discussion, declaring flatly, “God is everywhere. He has always been everywhere. He was here before He created here. He was always here.”
Wrote Mitchell, in his sixties: “Her answer confused me then and confuses me now.”
Still, his fundamentalist upbringing formed a baseline of belief and took a firm hold on him—one he spent much of the rest of his life trying to shake. But he never really could, no matter what the rest of his life’s experience, his intellect, or his copious reading was telling him. The Baptist ministers of his youth had insinuated themselves too deeply into his psyche to scrub, and it is no coincidence that later in life Mitchell would write about countless preachers, some of them truly inspirational, others little more than grifters. He was alternately bemused and in awe of them, and in any case they were Proustian connections to his childhood.
Which is not to say Joseph was a sober mope. On the contrary, he was a highly energetic child who mostly spent his days doing what all kids did—he played, dreamed, socialized, explored. As he looked back on it, this part of his childhood was idyllic. A collector from his earliest days, he liked to roam the nearby fields after a hard rain to see what kinds of arrowheads and Indian pottery shards had been dislodged. He and his friends played on a rope swing that hung from a massive white oak on the property. Then there were those many happy hours spent in the swamp trees, where he used an ingenious “climbing rope” of his own design, which had knots for handholds and rag-loop footholds tied into it and a brickbat at the end to return the rope to him when he slung it over the next branch up. High above the ground, moving from tree to tree, the boy’s vivid imagination also took flight. Naturally, many other Fairmont kids could be found cavorting in those same trees and swamps. But it’s a good bet the only one who was well read enough to pretend to be dashing Jan Ridd of Exmoor was Joseph Mitchell.
Literally everything about the swamp environment fascinated him, as passages from his draft memoir make clear.
I was just as interested in a streak of a kind of algae known locally as frog snot or in a cluster of old dead cypress roots covered with snails as I was in the fish and the crawfish and the water bugs and the water snakes. The water was the color of whiskey or tea—from some substance in the leaves and pine needles and cypress needles rotting in it, I was always told. You weren’t supposed to drink it—people said you could get chills and fevers, by which they meant malaria, from drinking branch water—but it looked clean enough to drink…. There were no well-defined paths in the branch and walking along beside the stream not watching where I was going, I would brush against some of the plants with my pants legs or step on them, bruising them, whereupon their various and sometimes quite surprising fragrances would suddenly fill the air. And occasionally I would reach down and pull a handful of leaves from some aromatic plant—a kind that I especially liked, such as wild ginger or wax myrtle or dog fennel, or a kind that might be unfamiliar to me and, for all I knew, poisonous—and crush them in my hand and smell them. Hours later, sometimes, the smell would still be on my fingers. And quite often, at night, taking off my clothes and hanging them up before going to bed, I would smell the fragrances of aromatic plants on my pants legs.
Such recollections do more than convey the unfettered joy of a rural childhood; they underscore the boy’s inborn powers of observation. Mitchell grew up knowing all these things in real time, as it were—what the plants were, the names of the trees, the flight patterns of red-tailed hawks and great horned owls, which reptiles were dangerous and which harmless, what was lurking in those tea-colored pools. He grasped “the significance and provenance of every arrowhead and pottery shard, the names of every native weed, flower, snake, bird and fish,” his daughter Nora would write. This acuity was due not only to Joseph’s prodigious curiosity but also to both parents, who took pains to educate their children about the natural world surrounding them—if for no other reason than safety’s sake. Beyond that, however, Betty in particular brought an aesthetic appreciation to these lessons. Just as she had with Joseph’s reading, for instance, she cultivated in her young son a passion for wildflowers.
The boy’s curiosity extended to the county’s families and their collective history. Many of these families were interwoven with the Mitchells and Parkers, and, as Joseph noted himself, he “developed an interest in it long before I was ten years old; the more attenuated the relationship, the more interesting it was.”
This part of his education also sprang from his parents, as well as from various aunts and uncles. Instead of the swamps, here Mitchell’s “classrooms” were the myriad little cemeteries that are as much a part of the North Carolina landscape as are the piney woods. Mitchell often addressed the emotional and intellectual significance of cemeteries in his life. They were not eerie or sad places but vibrant extensions of everyday life, to be used by the living to remain connected to kin who had “gone on.” When Joseph was a boy, for instance, his Baptist church routinely held Easter-egg hunts in its cemetery, the prizes hidden in the tall grass and weeds in and around the tombstones. “How wonderful it was to find them in the graveyard,” he recalled, “right where my grandmothers and grandfathers were buried.” Sunday rides in the country often included stops at cemeteries, where his father and mother would find the plots of their relatives and explain who they were to the children. At other times, Betty and her sisters would get together for a picnic behind their church after Sunday service, and once the fresh-picked watermelon was sliced and consumed, the group would stroll over to the adjacent cemetery. Mitchell’s Aunt Annie in particular could be counted on for some no-nonsense commentary on the graveyard denizens. “Here and there she would pause at a grave and tell us about the man or woman down below,” he wrote. “ ‘This man buried here,’ she would say, ‘was a cousin of ours, and he was so mean I don’t know how his family stood him. And this man here,’ she would continue, moving along a few steps, ‘was so good I don’t know how his family stood him.’ ”
Still, the person who figured most prominently in young Joseph’s life, far and away, was Daddy. Like so many sons throughout history, Joseph Mitchell would spend his entire life endeavoring to win his father’s approval. Even as a boy, he somehow sensed that their bond was destined to be an em
otionally complicated one. In his journal notes, written some six decades after the fact, Mitchell recorded an especially harrowing childhood memory. Like all farmers who owned land in and around the swamps, A.N. often was out clearing dead trees or removing stumps—the latter usually involving dynamite. Joseph was fascinated by this process, so calculated and yet so violent. A.N. was an “expert dynamiter,” his son recalled; he had tried to train others to do it, but they would displace too much earth with the explosion or set up the charges so that they achieved more noise than results. But A.N. seemed to know exactly how to do it. He approached the task carefully, like an engineer. He would circle the stump repeatedly, studying it, almost trying to “understand” it, before deciding how much dynamite to use and where to put it. “It was the first time I ever heard the phrase ‘center of gravity,’ which I love,” Joseph wrote.
Yet the boy, already well steeped in his Bible studies, also read a dark metaphor into the inherent danger of this father–son moment. “It reminds me somehow of the story of Abraham and Isaac and other stories about sacrifice that I had heard,” he wrote. The very thought, he said, “horrified me.”
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More prosaically, of course, stump-dynamiting represented another of the essential lessons in a farmer’s education. “He never said so in so many words,” Mitchell recalled, “but I knew he expected me to follow in his footsteps.” Yet as he got older, Joseph privately was feeling much less sanguine about the idea. He loved Fairmont, loved the country life, and genuinely admired his father. But the prospect of one day taking A.N.’s place thoroughly intimidated him.
Each passing year introduced more reasons for doubt. His love of literature was showing him there was a wider, more interesting world beyond Robeson County, and the sporadic travel he’d already done with his family only whetted his desire to experience more of it. It would be a lot of pressure, trying to replicate his father’s accomplishments and stature; hundreds of people relied on him for everything from small loans to planting advice to their very livelihoods. But a more acute, and practical, reason for Joseph’s apprehension was simply this: He was terrible at math. Quick as he was in every other way, for Joseph the sort of rote addition, subtraction, and multiplication that most children master by fifth grade was sheer misery. It wasn’t for lack of effort. He did the same kinds of memorization drills as his schoolmates, and he could grasp the underlying concepts. But for some inexplicable reason, the computational mental process that quickly becomes second nature for most people simply froze him. It was an organic condition that never really improved for the rest of his life.
The boy understood how such an obstacle would thwart someone in his father’s line of work. “You have to be extremely good at arithmetic” at commodities auctions, he told the literary critic Norman Sims in a wide-ranging interview conducted when Mitchell was eighty. “You have to be able to figure, as my father said, to deal with cotton futures, and to buy cotton. You’re in competition with a group of men who will cut your throat at any moment, if they can see the value of a bale of cotton closer than you. I couldn’t do it, so I had to leave…. Millions have come to New York City who didn’t quite fit in somewhere.”
The situation made the boy miserable. It embarrassed him, and classmates, as they will, teased him. Much worse, he constantly feared his father would bring up the math issue—“deliberately or inadvertently.” His daughter Nora said it often was deliberate—and not infrequently this played out at the dinner table, with the entire family there to watch. It’s unlikely that cruelty was A.N.’s intent; he surely believed this “tough love” would help crack what he assumed was merely a mental block for his intelligent son. Then again, he wouldn’t have been especially concerned if it did seem cruel. According to Nora, he “tortured” Joseph with quizzes: “He would ruin meals by shooting arithmetic problems at [him]—‘8 times 6?’ ‘30 minus 7?’ ‘200 times 15?’ ‘13 squared?’ I’m sure this was the beginning of his ulcer and his terrible headaches.”
In later years, Mitchell tried to compensate for the disability by keeping almost obsessive numbers-oriented records and lists. These were not just the basic ones many people maintain, such as stock holdings or important dates (though he kept those, too), but lists of things most people don’t think twice about. Mitchell’s files are full of handwritten tallies of amounts he’d paid for dry cleaning, books, movies, cab fare, lunches, even tips. Going over them, one imagines a man who felt that if he committed everything to paper, where the numbers couldn’t shift around on him, he might just wrest some control over his frustrating condition.
Tellingly, as an older man, Mitchell would sometimes refer to his math disability as a kind of dyslexia, the reading disability that didn’t really enter popular consciousness until the seventies. In retrospect, it’s quite possible that Mitchell suffered from a related condition called dyscalculia, which is the inability to perform basic mathematic functions. Just as dyslexics have a fundamental problem perceiving, say, the correct letter order in a word, people afflicted with dyscalculia might transpose numbers in their head, or confuse symbols, or otherwise jumble the components of the math equation in front of them. And they often come from parents who are exceedingly good at math, which only fuels their sense of anxiety or inadequacy. On the other hand, many sufferers are gifted with words; it’s not unusual for them to become writers and journalists. Although Mitchell is not known to have been so diagnosed, or even to have known of the existence of dyscalculia, he clearly experienced many of the condition’s symptoms.
This shortcoming created a stigma for Mitchell that went to the bone. The extent of his anxiety is most vividly illustrated in a vignette Mitchell produced in his journal in 1986. It was prompted by a recent visit back to North Carolina, where he learned of the death of a woman named Ruth Page Magnin. Ruth, whom Mitchell describes as a “consumptive-looking but appealing” girl, was in Mitchell’s high school class, and her father was one of the growers who sold cotton to A. N. Mitchell. In the scene, Ruth—presumably also math-challenged—resolutely refuses her teacher’s directive to go to the blackboard to work problems in front of the class. Mitchell expresses a grateful admiration for a frail girl’s courage—a courage one infers he had difficulty summoning in himself.
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Mitchell (in the middle of the third row) amid his classmates at Fairmont High School.
Go to the board, meaning the blackboard. God bless you, Ruth: You were delicate, but you outlived almost everybody in the class, and you never went to the board. Self sufficient. I’ll take the consequences, but I won’t go to the board.
When you went to the board, you put yourself entirely in the hands of the teacher: She could make a fool of you in front of everybody. A way of putting a rebellious student in his place, cutting a pupil down to size.
Long division, algebra. Some people, standing up there with a piece of chalk in their hand, if I did know it when I was sitting down, I didn’t know it when I stood up.
What I learned from her, if you are willing to take the consequences, all you have to do is say no. If the bastards get you into a corner, all you have to do is say no.
Go to the board, Ruth.
I don’t go to the board….
Given that the episode occurred more than sixty years prior, the scene is noteworthy for Mitchell’s still-raw ire, even rage. But one sees as well the small-town provincialism and petty tyranny that, even at a tender age, chafed him. After four generations, a Mitchell son was determining that the future awaited somewhere other than in Robeson County, North Carolina.
CHAPTER 3
CHAPEL HILL
I dimly recollect one day long ago at the university hearing you or Jack Crow or one of the other Spanish buffs or maybe it was one of the campus intellectuals at The Tar Heel or The Carolina Magazine say something about the enigmatic quality or the mysteriousness of the Spanish proverbs that were the inspiration for many of Goya’s Caprichos and that he used as titles for some of them. It i
s more than likely that I had never even heard of Goya before, but for some reason that aroused my curiosity and I went right over to the art department in the old library and got out whatever they had on the Caprichos, and my lifelong admiration for Goya began that afternoon.
—From a letter to a University of North Carolina classmate, 1985
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In the spring of 1925, just shy of his seventeenth birthday, Joseph Mitchell graduated from Fairmont High School. A.N. had not entirely given up the hope that his eldest might yet follow in his footsteps, but he was a pragmatist and for now he knew Joseph needed to continue his explorations. The young man had lately expressed a desire to study medicine, and even for A.N. that was an acceptable career alternative. He acceded to his son’s wish to attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Founded in 1789, Chapel Hill had a long-established reputation for academic excellence and was one of a handful of more “worldly” outposts available to the state’s brighter students. Situated in the middle of North Carolina, one hundred miles north of Fairmont and just west of the capital, Raleigh, it was (and remains) an exceedingly beautiful campus, its colonial-style brick buildings tucked amid ancient stands of Southern pine.
Socially, Mitchell thoroughly enjoyed his first extended time away from home, and he was a popular student. By now he had grown to his full height, a trim five feet ten inches. He had acquired a handsome, almost pretty face accentuated by penetrating blue eyes and a prominent but aquiline nose. A farm boy accustomed to hard labor and roughhousing with friends, he nonetheless carried himself with a physical grace surprising for a product of swamps and cotton fields.
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