Grandpa Chick cut a compelling figure, with his broad shoulders and his fine head of thick white hair. He always had ruddy cheeks and a booming laugh, and he would take me on his lap and tickle me until I cried and begged for mercy. But I had seen him, too, when he smelled of whiskey and walked with a crooked gait. I had lain awake in the attic bedroom and listened, breathless, as his slurred voice grew louder, yelling at GiGi; as much as I loved him, I was a little afraid of him, too.
Everybody in Waterford knew what GiGi had given up for Chick. She could have been a woman of substance, they said, with a fine house and an inheritance to pass on to her children. She could have divorced him and married someone who was worthy of her. God knows she had enough reason, with his drinking and gambling and carousing.
But instead she had stayed, being true to the vows she had solemnly taken thirty years before. She had accepted her lot in life and, for better or for worse, devoted herself to making something of Chick. Saint Georgia had martyred herself upon the altar of matrimonial fidelity, giving up her own life for her husband’s.
Sweet GiGi. Loving GiGi. Faithful, dedicated, blessed GiGi, doing her best to hold her reprobate husband to the straight and narrow. I, too, thought she was a genius and a candidate for canonization—until I got a glimpse of how she did it.
Cooter Randolph, the local bootlegger, was well known for supplying moonshine to most of the male population of Waterford and three surrounding counties. My grandfather was no exception, and GiGi had made up her mind to put a stop to it once and for all.
One hot summer afternoon I followed her, keeping out of sight as she picked her way through the woods to Cooter’s place. She wore a pale lavender shirtwaist and stockings, white gloves, and a little hat with purple pansies on one side. When she got to Cooter’s still, she found herself looking down the double barrel of a squirrel gun, and I had visions of throwing myself in the line of fire to save her life.
But GiGi didn’t blink an eye. She simply settled herself carefully on a rotting stump, adjusted her gloves, and said softly, “Cooter, we need to have ourselves a little chat.”
I’d heard about Cooter, but I’d never seen him before. Word had it that he’d spent time in the state penitentiary for killing a man who stumbled onto his land by accident. Shot him dead, square in the chest, people said, without asking a single question. Another time, he supposedly cut a man’s hand off with an ax for trying to steal a jar of hooch without paying for it.
Cooter Randolph, rumor asserted, wasn’t somebody you’d want to mess with. But up close, he didn’t look like a murderer or a monster. He was just a broken-down, sad old man, riddled with palsy and poisoned by alcohol. He was tall and lanky, with four days’ growth of beard and a mouthful of rotten yellow teeth. His eyes, bleary and bloodshot, swept over my grandmother with a pathetic, pleading expression. He cleared his throat and squirted a stream of tobacco juice through the space between his front teeth, then shakily lowered himself to a stump facing hers.
“Reckon I been expecting you, Miss Georgia,” he said.
Behind him I saw the tools of his trade: the rusty still with its coils of copper wire, the slow-burning fire under the distilling pot, the lines of clay jugs and mason jars waiting to hold the home brew as it dripped out the end of a slender pipe. The air in the clearing held mingled scents of wood smoke and corn liquor.
GiGi stared him down. “If I’m not mistaken, Cooter, you’ve been selling moonshine to Clayton again, haven’t you?”
He hung his head like a schoolboy reprimanded for rowdiness in the classroom. “Yes’m.”
“I thought we had an understanding about this.”
“Yes’m. But—”
“But what, Cooter?” Her voice was gentle and entreating.
“But I gotta make a living, Miss Georgia. Times is hard, and—”
She reached out and patted his grimy arm. “I know, Cooter. I understand. And I sympathize, you know I do. But you also know how I feel about moonshine whiskey. Especially when it finds its way into my husband’s hands.”
He began to shake all over. “You’re not gonna sic the sheriff on me, are you, Miss Georgia? Doc says I got me a bad liver, and if I had to go to jail, well, I wouldn’t make it, I swear to God I wouldn’t.”
She paused and thought for a minute. “You’re not a married man, are you, Cooter?”
He grunted. “Was, once.”
“And you live in the cabin back there?” GiGi pointed with an immaculate, white-gloved finger toward a shack that had nearly given itself back to the woods.
He nodded. His gaze bumped hers and then careened away.
“All right,” she soothed. “Here’s what we’ll do. You stop selling your home brew to my husband, and I’ll see to it that you get a hot meal every day. You look like you could use a good meal, couldn’t you, Cooter?”
He grinned sheepishly and nodded. “Yes’m. Ain’t et much of late.”
“I’ll make the arrangements. We have an agreement?” She gave him an odd, cold smile.
“Yes, ma’am, I reckon.”
“I’m glad we understand one another.” GiGi got up and straightened her skirt. “I’ll be on my way, then.”
Cooter jumped to his feet. “Sorry for troubling you, Miss Georgia. It won’t happen again.”
“I’m sure it won’t, Cooter,” she said smoothly. “Very sure.”
He gave her a gentlemanly nod, just short of a bow. “I’d take you back to the road, Miss Georgia, ’cept I gotta guard my still.”
“I can show myself out.” She said it as if she were making her exit from a summer cotillion. And then my grandmother turned her back on Cooter Randolph and his still and his loaded shotgun and went home the way she came.
All the way back to town, I shadowed my grandmother and watched her walking, head held high, the little pansies on her hat bobbing gently. She was a true lady, I thought, showing care and concern for those less fortunate. She had treated even the likes of Cooter Randolph with respect. She was going to provide meals for him so that he wouldn’t starve to death out there in the woods. A true humanitarian, my grandmother—seeing to the needs of a poor alcoholic bootlegger. I felt both proud and humbled to bear the Bell and Posner names.
Later that evening my insulating bubble of familial euphoria burst. I was sitting on the back stoop eating a slice of watermelon, which GiGi would not allow in the house, and overheard her and my mother talking about the encounter with Cooter Randolph.
“You told him you would provide hot meals for him?” My mother’s low laugh held a note of mocking reprimand. “I don’t believe it, Mother. You lied!”
“A lady never lies,” GiGi corrected haughtily. “I told him I would see to it that he got a hot meal every day. And that’s exactly what I did. He’ll be well fed in jail.”
Jail? My grandmother, the sweet saint of Waterford, was sending that poor sick old man to jail?
“Clayton led me right to Cooter’s place,” GiGi went on, “and never even knew I was following him. Sheriff Ketchum has been looking for that still for months. Now he’s got himself an anonymous tip, directions good as a road map, straight out there. By this time tomorrow that engine of evil will be smashed into a thousand pieces and burned, and if that old shack goes up in the blaze as well, so much the better. No one will ever know I had a thing to do with it.”
Passive. I had always thought my grandmother to be the passive kind of Southern Lady. It had never entered my mind that a passive lady could get her own way and still find a way to maintain her unsullied reputation for sweetness. In later years, when I took psychology and first encountered the term passive-aggressive, I had an image in my mind, just waiting for a label: GiGi, facing down Cooter Randolph’s shotgun, her spine ramrod straight and her eyes filled with a cold, calculating smile.
I couldn’t finish my watermelon. My throat was tight and my eyes swam with tears, and a wavery vision of Cooter’s sad, broken countenance rose up in my mind. Jail would kill him, I was c
ertain, and if it didn’t, what did he have to come back to? The charred remains of a cabin he once called home? The memory of being deceived, his pathetic life snatched out from under him by a graciously conniving Southern Lady?
In that moment, my adulation of my grandmother was crushed beyond repair. Her sainthood. Her honeyed passivity. It had all been an act. A damn good act, but an act nevertheless.
Cooter Randolph never sold another drop of hooch to Grandpa Chick—or anyone else, for that matter. He died six weeks into his three-month sentence and was buried without ceremony in the no-man’s-land between the white folks’ graveyard and the plots reserved for the Negroes. From that day forward, the boss at Barclay Lumber hand-delivered my grandfather’s paycheck to GiGi every Friday. And the banker, Mr. Longchamps, wouldn’t give Chick a dime out of his own account without first making a telephone call to Miss Georgia for approval.
The woods, after all, were full of Cooters, and Chick would find them if he had a dollar in his pocket. She did it all, I heard GiGi tell Mama, for Grandpa Chick’s own good.
I fleshed out the story in as much detail as I could remember, then I sat for a long time thinking about my great-great-great-grandmother’s manipulation, my grandmother’s deception, my mother’s control. At last I began to write again:
Is this the legacy of the Bell women, the heritage I am destined to perpetuate?
Some women, like my mother, dominated by exerting the considerable force of their will. Others, like GiGi, did it through manipulation, while maintaining the facade of sweet femininity and submissiveness. But the effect was the same: A Southern Lady always got what she wanted. And if she was really good at it, as my grandmother was, she came out looking like the long-suffering victim of other people’s insensitivity. A model of righteous forbearance. A martyr.
The day Cooter Randolph went to jail, the fragile web of my childish innocence began to unravel. Saint Georgia’s halo began to tarnish. And I, at the tender age of not-quite-seven, first set foot on a path that would prove to be the undoing of my mother’s plans to make me into a Southern Lady.
In that initial moment of sympathy for poor sick Cooter Randolph, I did something unimaginable, unthinkable.
I took up for the underdog.
7
Once Harry was settled into his daily routine of fishing, baseball, movies, and milk shakes, Mama and GiGi got down to the business of my “training.”
It was sheer torture, and the oddest thing about it was that the two of them seemed to think that I should enjoy it, that I should be having fun. Or if I wasn’t enjoying it, I should at least act as if I was. It was a lesson I was slow to learn, this art of pretense.
One of the prime directives that governs the actions of a Southern Lady is that she never, under any circumstances, allows others to feel uncomfortable in her presence. In her role as hostess, she serves as catalyst between her guests, smoothing over any ruffled feathers, smiling, calming the waters.
For six and a half years of my young life, I had seen that false expression on my own mother’s face, but I did not as yet have powers of articulation sufficient to explain it. The forced, fixed smile that did not reach her eyes, the mask of congeniality. She had worn it the day she ushered my friend Dorrie to the front door and out of my life forever, and she wore it any time other people—particularly people who irritated her—were in her presence. A Southern Lady, after all, did not give in to negative emotions. Appearances had to be maintained at all cost.
This genteel affability, however, did not seem to apply with members of one’s own family. It was connected, in some mystical, metaphysical way, with the hinges on the front door. When the door was shut behind the final guest, the mask vanished and the real feelings reasserted themselves. To my six-year-old mind this translated into: You have to be nice to people you don’t like, but you can be as nasty as you want to people you love.
The whole principle of mannerly pretense confused and frustrated me, especially because my mother was completely intractable on the issue of lying. She didn’t use the word “lie,” of course. She called it “prevarication.” No doubt I was the only first-grader in the nation who could spell, define, conjugate, and use the verb “to prevaricate” without a second thought.
And, much to my mother’s dismay, I had a tendency toward prevarication. I came by it honestly enough: My father, as I have said, was an accomplished storyteller, and he rarely let a conscience scrupulous about truth get in the way of a good tale. If it told well, with sufficient drama or pathos or humor, he would tell it. And then retell it, with appropriate elaborations and editorial changes, depending upon his audience.
Mama, however, had no patience for telling stories. And when I told one—when I prevaricated, or even stretched the truth a little, just for effect—she would give me a lecture that made my little ears burn.
My mother never spanked me. Her lectures—or even her silent, reproachful glances—were enough to cow me into submission. When she cleared her throat, I would drop whatever I was doing and stand rigid, waiting to be corrected. Once, when I was about five, I was sprawled on the parlor rug, engrossed in a book, when she walked into the room and coughed. Twice.
I jumped up, my heart pumping, my mind scrambling to know what I had done wrong so I could confess it—with tears, if necessary. She stared hard at me, standing there at attention, waiting for my punishment, and for just an instant her expression softened into something like sympathy.
In that fleeting moment, I thought she was going to apologize, to say, “I’m sorry I’ve been so hard on you.”
Then she put a hand to her throat. “I think I’m coming down with a cold,” she said and went into the bathroom to rummage in the medicine cabinet for the cough syrup. We never spoke of the incident, but for years I lived on the hope of seeing that soft spot reappear.
Nothing got my mother’s ire up like falsehood, but she seemed not to see the connection between lying and the kind of social charade she and my grandmother tried to instill in me during that long hot Mississippi summer.
“A Southern Lady is always polite and gracious, Priscilla, no matter what she thinks of a person.” GiGi repeated the words for what seemed like the hundredth time. “She smiles and engages in small talk and always looks interested in what others are saying.”
I had seen the technique close-up, in my grandmother’s interaction with Cooter Randolph. And although I had admired her act at the time, the ultimate outcome of the charade gave me a funny feeling in my stomach.
On the surface it was a nice, thoroughly Southern idea—being polite to people even if you couldn’t stand their guts. But beneath that upper crust ran an underground stream of poisoned water, and I had witnessed for myself what kind of damage it could do when unleashed. It reminded me of “Little Red Riding Hood,” the wolf disguised in Grandma’s nightclothes. What big teeth it had, this custom of cordial duplicity.
I had plenty of opportunities that summer to practice smiling and small talk. Every day, it seemed, either we had ladies in for tea or we went to their homes. Most of them were my grandmother’s friends, some of them teetering on the verge of senility, but all of them proper ladies. Right down to crazy old Letitia Sutterfield, who kept insisting that her grandson’s Yankee fiancée was a Soviet spy who had been sent to snuff her out and steal her inheritance to further the cause of Communism in the Free World.
“I know, Tisha.” My grandmother patted the old woman’s hand and offered her a tea cake. “Just like Mata Hari. But don’t you worry, everything will be all right.” She said the proper words, but when Miss Letitia wasn’t watching, she sent a glance to my mother that spoke volumes. The old biddy ought to be locked up, the expression said. For her own good, of course.
I sat clutching my teacup, vacillating between two contradictory sets of emotions. On the one hand, I was tempted to join in the laughter at the old loony’s expense. But on the other, I felt sorry for her. She might be a little daft, but she was a dear old soul who
truly—if misguidedly—believed her fears to be grounded.
My upbringing wouldn’t permit me to contradict my mother and grandmother to their faces, and my conscience wouldn’t let me make poor old Letitia Sutterfield the butt of a cruel joke. I sat there like a stone, my jaws frozen in a Southern Lady smile. It was, in my mother’s favorite expression, a “learning experience.”
Before the summer was over, I had the vacant smile down pat. Small talk was more difficult to master.
Apparently one of the hallmarks of a true Southern Lady is the ability to carry on extended conversation without expressing an opinion or offending anyone. Innocuous phrases such as, “Oh, really?” and “Isn’t that interesting?” and “Well, imagine that!” littered the tearoom like so many discarded napkins. I never heard a single word I thought interesting—except perhaps Miss Letitia’s story about the spy. Most of the conversation seemed designed to atrophy the imagination rather than stimulate it. But I watched in fascination and wonder as my mother and grandmother played the game, always with that smile on their faces, until the door closed with a groaning finality and the afternoon tea had come to an end.
There was one person that summer whom I found genuinely interesting: my grandmother’s “girl,” Molly-Faith Johnston.
Molly, who couldn’t have been a day under sixty, was a large, buxom black woman with kinky white hair and shiny skin. Molly and her husband, Stick, worked for GiGi and Grandpa Chick. Stick kept the yard and did odd jobs, and Molly came at nine A.M. every weekday morning to do the laundry, cleaning, and cooking.
GiGi insisted that Molly and Stick were “part of the family,” but even at age six, I knew better. Family didn’t sit on the back stoop with plates in their laps to have their dinner while everybody else sat in the dining room around the big table.
The Book of Peach Page 5
