by Lynne Bryant
"Are you kidding me?" she said. "She'll never leave her job. I think he ought to move up there and find a church. It's easier for a black man to find a church than for a black woman to find a high-paying management job." In our ongoing debate over issues of color, Rita usually wins the argument.
My mind wanders to the time I'll have on my hands after launching this tour. Thanks to Elsie Spencer's blackballing, I didn't get elected as pilgrimage director this year. But, as I expected, it was a relief. And Rita and I are working together now on the Queen City restoration project. I think Louisa and Ellery Humboldt's place might be my last antebellum home restoration. The home I thought Rita and Jack might be interested in purchasing didn't go on the market this spring after all. But I'll keep my ears open — even though my connections aren't what they used to be, since I've stopped working so hard at maintaining them.
Dudley filed for divorce, so we sold the big house and I'm looking for something smaller, maybe a little bungalow near the college campus. In the meantime, I'm staying with Grace at Pecan Cottage. We make pretty good roommates. She's even taught me to make muscadine jelly ... and cathead biscuits.
As we move on toward the Clark family graves, Grace and I trail behind the others, and I'm overcome again with emotions about the stories I've heard in the past few months. I take Grace's arm. "I still can't fathom how kind and gracious you and Adelle are after all that you've been through in your lives. If anyone has a grudge to carry, it's the two of you." It startles me when Grace stops and squeezes my arm with an iron grip. She turns and faces me, looking up into my eyes. She takes my hands and holds them in her gnarled smooth ones. I look down at our hands there together, not even thinking about pulling away. I'm embarrassed that my tears fall on Grace's hands.
"Now you listen to me, Roxanne Reeves,"
Grace says. "Holding grudges doesn't help anyone. I learned that a long time ago when we lost Zero. Life is full of pain, but there is joy, too. Adelle loved Zero with all of her heart, and after she lost him, she was never the same. But she still found joy. She found it in her family and her church and her work. Why, she was a pioneer! Remember, Adelle Jackson was the first black nurse to work at Clarksville Hospital."
"I remember," I say, pulling my hands away to search my purse for a tissue to dry my eyes.
Here we are: me, a mid-forties white woman, letting go of my climb up the Southern social ladder, and Grace, an eighty-nine-year-old black woman who's never been the least bit interested in climbing anybody's ladder, strolling slowly through an old cemetery talking and looking at the graves. I recognize other names: Ezekiel Green, Robert Webster — Jr. and Sr. I know all of their stories now. They're no longer anonymous black people from the past. They're alive for me with all of their tragedies and joys.
Grace and I come to a stop behind the others at the graves of her mother, father, grandmother, and Zero. Zero's headstone reads Thomas "Zero" Clark, 1911 to 1931, He Is with the Angels Now. I ask Grace, "Do you really believe that?"
"What's that, sugar?" Grace asks.
"That he's with the angels."
"Yes, I do. I believe they all watch over me. That's what carries me through."
Grace insists on placing the flowers at Zero's headstone herself. Jack kneels to steady her and Rita helps Adelle over to the stone bench that has been placed near the graves. I look out across the cemetery and am pleased and surprised to see Daniel and Billy walking toward us along the graveled center lane. Between them is a stooped elderly black man. He's wearing a black suit and hat and I can tell he's leaning heavily on Daniel's arm. I don't recognize him. As he gets nearer, I can tell he's probably about Grace's age. There's something vaguely familiar about him, but I imagine I'm confusing him with someone else — I've seen so many photographs and heard so many stories.
Grace is still bending down, straightening the flower arrangement on Zero's grave. Jack is kneeling beside her, waiting patiently to help her up.
"Rita," I say softly, "I think you need to look at this." Rita follows my gaze and, for a moment, forgets Adelle as she comes to stand beside me.
"Who is that?" she asks. "It couldn't be ..."
As they draw closer, Billy raises her hand and waves. Daniel Mason has a grin on his face that could only mean one thing. As we watch them approach, I glance back. Adelle has not seen them yet, nor has Grace. They are both focused on getting the flowers just right.
Rita and I walk over to meet them. I think we're both holding our breath, wondering if this man is who we think he is.
As we greet Billy and Daniel, the man removes his hat, revealing closely cut graying hair and a handsome, deeply lined face. Billy places her arm through his and says, "Ladies, I'd like you to meet Mr. Albert Jackson, Jr."
He shakes our hands warmly, and just as we step aside to bring them over to the grave, where Jack is just helping Grace up, we hear a gasp and I look up to see Adelle clutch her hand to her chest. Fearful that it's her heart again, I start to rush over to her. But I see quickly, as she stands and fixes her eyes on Junior, that this is joy, not pain. She tears her eyes from her brother and says, "Gracie ... Gracie ... look who's here."
Grace has unfolded herself into a standing position and is brushing off her dress when Junior reaches her. She looks up, freezes, and her hands fly to her mouth as the small spade she was using drops to the ground. I can see the tears forming instantly in her eyes. "Junior?"
We all stand back and watch as the prodigal brother is enfolded in the arms of two women who never stopped loving him or believing that he might return someday. I think to myself, maybe Grace was right. Life is full of pain, but there is joy, too. Today, I choose joy.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
First of all, let me say that Catfish Alley is entirely a work of fiction. That being said, in some ways it is entirely a work of fact, albeit with author's license in some historical details. Catfish Alley is loosely based on places, events, and people in my hometown of Columbus, Mississippi. I grew up just outside of Columbus in a rural community called New Hope. My mother says that when my grandparents moved to New Hope, the school doubled in size. That was the early 1900s, and my grandparents eventually had fifteen children, so that explains the sudden increase in the school population. I lived in that community until my late twenties, graduating from the same high school as my mother had.
My grandparents were cotton farmers, and my sister still lives on what remains of that farm in the house built just after the Civil War, where my mother, the thirteenth child, was born in 1924. As a young girl, I spent many hours in the gardens, fields, and orchards of Mississippi, picking peas, pulling corn, gathering pecans, shaking apple trees, and digging up peanuts. We canned or put up everything we ate, so if it could be shelled, shucked, peeled, or cracked, we or somebody we knew grew it. My brothers hunted and fished, and there was frequently a deer hung from a tree in my mother's backyard, waiting to be skinned and dressed. I admired my mother's ability to catch a string of bream or crappie, clean them on a piece of tin laid across two sawhorses, and then fry them up into delectable morsels, accompanied by hush puppies and coleslaw.
We certainly never considered ourselves poor and never lacked for good food and plenty of it. My mother, at eighty-six, still keeps a small garden and still makes pickles in a hundred-year-old butter churn. None of this seemed unusual to me. It was my life and a good one. It was not until I reached adulthood and left Mississippi for graduate school that I realized very few of my colleagues had similar life experiences. I guess in some ways I've always been a throwback to a previous era.
As a child I spent many long, hot summer days with my grandmother and my mentally disabled aunt Mary. Aunt Mary was a classic example of the Southern credo of keeping your special people at home. Aunt Mary was one of my best childhood friends. We shared books like The Bobbsey Twins and Trixie Belden. During the long afternoons, while Grandma and Mary napped, I sought shelter from the heat under an old oak tree that had rooted up the sidewalk in front of Gra
ndma's house. I think that's when storytelling came alive for me. Making up stories was a way to pass the time for a little girl who spent much of her childhood in the company of old women.
My grandmother always had her afternoon nap in her four-poster feather bed — the same one where many of her children were born — under the watchful eye of her father staring out from an old-timey photograph. The day my great-grandfather was discharged from the Confederate Army, he had this picture taken. His discharge papers peek out of his coat pocket as he stares solemnly into the camera. I always wondered what else he did that day.
There were no black maids or housekeepers working for my family. As a matter of fact, we had very little interaction with black folks. It's difficult to explain how ignorant you can be of what life is like for a whole other group of people unless you've experienced a segregated world. It wasn't until I went to nursing school alongside black women that I was brave enough to ask why a person would put oil in her hair, instead of constantly trying to get it out like the white girls I knew; or what it meant to have ashy skin — a word not in my repertoire.
Because my world and my perspective were so narrow and defined by the seasons — spring and summer when we worked in the garden, fall when we went back to school, and whatever was in between that passed for winter — I never really developed an appreciation of my local history. Like so many Southern white children, I was oblivious of the issues of race raging around me in the sixties. It was not until my school was integrated when I was in the sixth grade, in 1971, that I found myself mixing with blacks. I can only imagine how difficult it was for the black kids who lost the school they had attended for years, only to be thrown in with a bunch of white kids who had no knowledge of their lives and no appreciation of their struggle. Forces outside of us pushed Mississippi toward integration. I'm not sure it ever would have happened otherwise. In most ways we remained segregated, even after formal desegregation.
We played separately, ate separately, shopped separately. And when my own daughter graduated from New Hope twenty-five years later, in 2002, there was still a black homecoming queen and a white homecoming queen.
Even though I took Mississippi history in school, I knew very little of the history all around me in the town of Columbus. I didn't know until I grew up and left my own hometown that Columbus was the birthplace of Tennessee Williams, the famous playwright; Red Barber, the baseball sports-caster; and Henry Armstrong, the world boxing champion. All of these men were born right around the same time as my fictional characters Zero Clark and Junior Jackson.
I didn't know that the women who met to decorate soldiers' graves in the late 1800s were part of the origin of what we now call Memorial Day. I didn't know that in the 1920s, Eudora Welty attended what was then called Mississippi State College for Women, later renamed Mississippi University for Women, in Columbus, where I earned my first degree. At least I knew that "the W," as it's called, was the first state-supported college for women in the country. Maybe I read that somewhere on the admission paperwork. In retrospect, I'm amazed at my own ignorance.
During the Civil War, in order to protect the lives of wounded soldiers sheltered in the grand mansions-turned-hospitals, Nathan Bedford Forrest negotiated to keep Columbus from being destroyed by Union soldiers. Thus, a large number of antebellum homes were left unscathed. In 1940, the historic foundation started the annual pilgrimage tour of homes. That tour is now recognized as one of the best and most authentic antebellum home tours in the country. Not until many years later were the historical sites of African-Americans acknowledged. What began as highlights for Black History Month evolved into an African-American Heritage Tour with a list of historical venues recognizing the businesses, homes, and contributions of the African-American community.
Later in my life, once I'd gotten some distance from my home state and the widened perspective of graduate school, I began to wrestle with what had been integral to my growing-up years: the racial jokes; the almost complete segregation of the races; the dubious way that Southern blacks viewed whites and vice versa. While in my doctoral program in Austin, Texas, I made my very first close black friend; she was from big-city Brooklyn, New York, and I was from rural Mississippi — our life experiences couldn't have been more different. My friendship with Mae helped me across that color line drawn in my youth.
When I returned home to Mississippi to visit, I became conscious of a feeling I would get from young black women, who seemed to view me as an object of disdain. I didn't understand it, yet I thought that I deserved it — not for any particular act of racism on my part, but simply because of my color. My friend Mae had helped me understand that my whiteness was accompanied by privilege whether I chose to exploit it or not. Those women knew this; they had always known. I was the latecomer to this understanding.
As the years went by and I continued to wrestle with my relationship to Mississippi, I found myself drawn more and more to its history. I found myself wanting to understand what was bred into Mississippi whites that moved us so slowly toward accepting the equality of blacks. Was it that we were still so close to a generation of slaveholders who genuinely believed that blacks were born to a life of service? Was it, as many whites said, because blacks are different? So often I heard Southerners say that it's easy for Yankees to preach about integration and equality because there aren't any black people where they live. Was that true?
When I began to research antebellum homes for some of my writing, I ran across the list of sites for the Columbus African-American tour. I began to wonder about the stories of the men and women who might have lived during those early years of the twentieth century. I started to research places that I'd grown up around but never really noticed. I discovered that you can live in a town, reach adulthood, marry, have children of your own, and never fully understand the cultural struggle going on all around you. Whether by choice or by ignorance, the pressure to keep the status quo in Mississippi is like the humidity — ever present in the air.
In my research, I discovered the name of O. N. Pruitt and recognized that his name was inscribed on the photographic portraits of my oldest sister and brother hanging on the wall in my mother's bedroom. These were portraits that my mother had Mr. Pruitt take in the early 1940s to send to my father, who was a soldier stationed in Germany. I found that Pruitt did much more than produce sweet portraits of babies.
He also photographed freak shows, circus acts, dead children, tent revivals, river baptisms, and, much to my surprise, lynchings. He was even part of the group of photographers who produced the lynching postcards that were circulated throughout the South in the 1920s and '30s. I found a scholar, Berkley Hudson, whose dissertation work was a study of O. N. Pruitt's photography from 1920 to 1960. The gruesome image of a 1930s double lynching of two young black men that occurred in the same county where I grew up touched something deep inside me and made me want to tell this story.
So, out of all of this imagery, memory, and life experience, the story of Catfish Alley was born. I only hope to touch on the reality of what it's like to live in the South, not with judgment or any assumption of righteousness, but with a simple desire to tell a story. They say "write what you know." For me, it's been more about writing what I need to understand. In the end, it's just a story about two women, two women who form an unlikely friendship. But then, I believe that's how we really change how we see our worlds — one relationship at a time.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For my sense of place and the rootedness that sustains me wherever I go, I thank my Southern family. I thank my Colorado family for the daily love and support that grounds me through the ups and downs of writing. Thanks to my dear friends in the original writing group who encouraged me to persist.
Thanks to my wonderful agent, Kevan Lyon, for believing in my work and guiding me through this process. And finally, thanks to my amazing editor, Ellen Edwards, for her meticulous attention to detail, and for those thought-provoking questions that made my novel stronger and
continue to help me grow as a writer.
Conversation
Guide Catfish Alley
LYNNE BRYANT
This Conversation Guide is intended to enrich the individual reading experience, as well as encourage us to explore these topics together — because books, and life, are meant for sharing.
A CONVERSATION WITH LYNNE BRYANT
Q. Your Author's Note explains how you came to write Catfish Alley, but when did you first begin to use writing to explore what you needed to understand about life?
A. I think my writing has always been an outward expression of an inner search. Whether it was childhood flights of imagination about bubble people who lived at the bottom of the bathtub drain, snippets of prose, feeble attempts at poetry, journaling, or other attempts at novels, writing has always been an exploration for me. I believe we tell stories for that reason — to understand our world. Even my doctoral dissertation was a philosophical inquiry. Only it wasn't very publishable!
Back in 2007, I entered a contest sponsored by Borders to write a post-Katrina love letter to New Orleans. I remember how people were still trying to understand why so many New Orleanians did not want to leave the city during and after the hurricane. As a Southerner, I knew that their reasons for staying had to do with home and rootedness. Where else were they to go? Anyway, I entered that contest, and much to my surprise, I won! My very short essay was an attempt to understand the spirit of the people of New Orleans. I included my love letter to New Orleans on one of my blog posts (see my Web site at www.lynnebryant.com).
