Rita Will_Memoir of a Literary Rabble-Rouser

by Rita Mae Brown

  As much as our enemies hate being challenged, it makes them respect you even as they hate you.

  No one respects a wuss.

  The Judy vs. Martina lawsuit was supremely foolish. It wasn’t a wise choice of battleground. But once they were locked in combat, we had more to lose politically by not solving the problem than by solving it.

  That time could certainly have been put to better use.

  Herein lies the secret of successful politics: Don’t fight defensive battles. A good offense is a good defense. If you’re defensive, you’re always on your enemy’s ground or fighting to your enemy’s game plan. You can’t win that way, you can only limit damage.

  I wasn’t winning anything.

  I was relieved when Judy left. The invasion of the pine beetles eating away at my crop coincided with her outrageous spending.

  I wondered if I would have to sell the farm. I was relying on my pine crop to retire some debt. The trees were falling down before my very eyes.

  I was beginning to think that no good deed goes unpunished. Self-pity isn’t part of my emotional makeup but. I was feeling a touch of it.

  My redbud clover seed burned up in a small drought. Thirty-five hundred dollars’ worth of seed, fried. There went the next hay crop. (I’m a big believer in soil tests, overseeding and fertilizing.) Everywhere I looked I saw losses.

  And Aunt Mimi was failing.

  I shook myself out of this pity party.

  Citation kept running. So would I.

  84

  The Death of Dragon Lady

  Her mind clear as a bell, Aunt Mimi’s body began to fail. Her old back problems felt worse and she couldn’t get around the way she used to, which upset her.

  To Julia Ellen had fallen the task of caring for her mother, a mother who loathed taking orders. She’d growl at Julia Ellen, yell at her sometimes. Julia Ellen had her own problems to contend with; after all, she wasn’t getting any younger, either, and she can’t take a lot of stress.

  I’d write my aunt or call. She’d brighten and tell stories, and at the end she even forgot to lash me with her rosary beads.

  She shocked me when she said, “The Church is wrong about divorce. My Julia Ellen would be better off today if she could have divorced Russell years ago.”

  “Aunt Mimi?” I wasn’t sure I was speaking to my real aunt.

  “Oh, yes. I sits and thinks and sometimes I just sits.” She laughed, quoting her own mother. “I think the Church is wrong and I was wrong.”

  “You did what you thought was right at the time.”

  “Who is going to take care of Julia Ellen when I’m gone? He’s spent all her money.”

  I interrupted, “He’s good at heart, Aunt Mimi.”

  “I know he is. I like him but I don’t like him as my daughter’s husband. I never should have let her marry him in the first place. I wanted her to marry—”

  “Aunt Mimi, she hated that rich guy.” I stepped in before she could go on a tear about the “chosen” son-in-law.

  “She’d be well off today.”

  “She’d be miserable.”

  “She’s miserable now.”

  “She’s miserable because she sees you in pain and she can’t do much. Basically, Julia Ellen would be a happy person if everybody would leave her alone.”

  Oh, there was an icy silence on the other end of that line. “You’re turning into my sister!”

  “Were you ever bored around Juts?”

  “No.”

  “Neither was I.”

  “Well—you’ve got a point there.” She paused a moment. “Rita, I won’t live much longer. I’ve lived a long time as it is. You won’t forget me when I’m gone, will you?”

  “Aunt Mimi, I could never forget you, and I promise to light candles for you in church, in your church.”

  “Really?”

  “I promise. You held me during that blizzard, you fed me. You helped Dad drive the car. I’ll have a mass said for you and I will light candles for you until the day I die.”

  A moment passed—and not a tearful one, I might add. “Do you do that for Juts?”

  “No. I say prayers for her but not in the Catholic church.”

  “Oh—I can’t wait to tell her!” She laughed.

  Aunt Mimi died in her sleep on May 20, 1993, at home. Odd that she slipped away on Dolley Madison’s birthday. Two women, both of them guides, if you will. The one gone since 1849 but leaving behind a legacy of deep moral conviction and tremendous courage. The other despotic, rigid and trying to be something she wasn’t, a saint. Underneath all that baloney. Aunt Mimi was as gay (old use of the word) as Juts. The raucous humor, the love of dancing and parties, the desire to shine … it was all there, but she’d worked so hard to cover it up.

  The few times I saw Aunt Mimi let ’er rip, like at the butchers’ picnic or at the York Fair, she was as much fun as Mom.

  They were all gone now. Mom. Dad. Aunt Mimi. Bucky. Mother and Daddy Brown. My beloved PopPop. Virginia. Even Earl, whom I could never stand, but still, he was gone, too.

  I realized that liking or not liking someone was irrelevant. It was the time in history that you shared. A time binds you to another person just as passions bind you to the dead. I am bound to foxhunters I have never met, to Aristophanes, to Dolley Madison, by our mutual passions and concerns. But the people of the flesh, the ones I heard, smelled and watched, the giants of my childhood, they’re gone.

  This time comes to each of us and each of us must light a candle.

  I supposed in Aunt Mimi’s case I should light a blowtorch.

  I miss the old dragon.

  And I miss those times, those primary colors of early memories, the 1940s and the 1950s. I miss the cars and trucks with the big rolling fenders. I miss the tinny music swinging out of the radio and Mom dancing as she worked, singing along in her lovely soprano. I miss seeing Dad lift a three-hundred-pound side of beef as though it were no heavier than a cinder-block. I miss Bucky, paint-splattered, putting me on his shoulder and telling me what a wonderful little girl I was. I miss Mickey and always shall.

  Was it the time? Or were the people kinder then? Perhaps if I were a child now, people would be equally kind, as they should be to small ones. I don’t know.

  But my memories are that it was a unique time. We’d won a terrible war. Life could begin again. We could build cars for pleasure instead of tanks for killing. We could thank God for our deliverance. People were happier then, I think. And I think, too, they had more respect for horses and animals because they were closer to them. We still had a good-sized population of people who lived on farms. Now the percentage is so small that the city people and suburban people will eventually destroy us with legislation and taxes. When I was little you could make a living as a small farmer. It’s almost impossible now. In some ways, I feel that loss as keenly as the loss of the people.

  Aunt Mimi left a legacy. It may not be what she intended, but then, does life ever turn out as you intend it to? No. Aunt Mimi and Juts will live as long as people want to laugh at the foibles, pettiness, battles and love that exist in families, in small towns.

  Aunt Mimi and Mom gave me my material. They dug a well that can never run dry. If I had a hundred years, I couldn’t run out of stories.

  I’ve kept my promise to Aunt Mimi. I light a candle for her each time I visit St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. If I happen by a Catholic church when I’m on the road and have a few moments, I light a candle and say a prayer of thanks. There’s a nice church in Staunton, Virginia—St. Francis. I’ll have to go there from time to time for her.

  There’s a lovely old Episcopal church in Greenwood, up the road from me on Route 250. Sometimes I go there for Mother. There’s not a Lutheran church nearby, and I’m as happy in an Episcopal church as in a Lutheran one anyway. Truly, Mom wouldn’t care so long as it’s not a Catholic church.

  I think I’ll say a prayer for Aunt Mimi in Emmanuel Episcopal Church and light a candle for Mom at St. Fr
ancis. Wonder what will happen. Just because they’re dead I see no reason not to torment them.

  But then again, they aren’t truly dead, are they?

  As long as you love someone, the best part of them lives.

  85

  Let There Be Light

  The undergirding of every novel is structure. I build them as I would build a house. The two-foot-thick basement walls are not visible to the eye, but they are necessary.

  Over the years I’ve worked at structure and I’ve learned to love it. At first I resisted. Being southern, I loved the anecdote, the chat of characters. I still do, but the actual building of a novel has become a deep joy for me.

  It’s no surprise I like building, period. Whether it’s a run-in shed, a stable, a house, I love creating spaces. Gardening is born of this same impulse, and there I feel close to Mother.

  We have a good team at the farm and it took years to assemble it. You kiss a lot of toads before you find the prince. Calvin Lewis, Robert Steppe and John Morris are the princes.

  The hunt staff, most of them friends and volunteers, enliven the days: Herbie Jones, Jim Craig, Sara Taylor, Amy Burke, John Gray, Eleanor Hartwell and Cindy Chandler. Cindy gardens like she rides: perfect form.

  Sometimes Robert Lyn Kee Chow joins us in the summers. He brings along his green horses and he brings us along, too.

  And always, there’s Betty Burns.

  Good people make for a good life.

  If you wrote the story of my life, you could probably structure it better than I can. It’s extremely difficult to reach the critical distance necessary to shape your own life with language. The closer I get to the present the more difficult it becomes. I lose my sense of proportion, a sense that comes quite easily when I regard 1954. Perhaps this nearsightedness occurs to everyone attempting the brazen task of setting down their life as they lived it, especially as lived from within.

  The constants in my life have been cats, dogs, horses, the arts and my friends. I have often said that friendship is love made bearable.

  The older I get the more I realize that I am absorbing my friends’ experiences. I’m not only living my life, I am living their lives. I am stretching my mind that much further to grasp their brilliant thoughts.

  My friends are all smarter than I am. That may be the smartest thing about me: I surround myself with people who are above me and then I try to catch up.

  I’ll never catch up. I know that, but trying is almost as good as getting there. Process is as much fun as product. The journey is in many ways more luminous than the destination.

  What would my life be without my friends? Nothing. I’ve often wondered what I would do if given the chance to be frozen before I die and to be revived whenever scientists can restore our health and perhaps a bit of our youth. Would it be worth it? I don’t think so, because that silken web of love, those glistening filaments that connect us to one another, would be sundered. Life is not worth living without those connections.

  Evil is born in loneliness and despair. One of the crudest punishments for a human being is to be separated from other human beings—or to be told s/he is a lesser human being. How can people learn to bind themselves to others if they’re being pushed away?

  I kept coming back. I was lucky. Some people took the chance on being my friend, just as Juts and Ralph took the chance on adopting me those many years ago.

  Love is an act of faith.

  I never thought I would have a partner in life. Being the one Out There lesbian for those many years certainly squelched my chances for a life with a man or a woman. The man would be badgered daily by his friends—“Hey, Hank, think she’s sneaking off?”—and the woman would hear nonstop homophobia dressed up as concern.

  I had resigned myself to a series of idle affairettes and I was even losing interest in them. And then Hunter Hughes, an old acquaintance, who deserves his own sitcom because he’s funny, perverse, rebellious, oversexed—well, you get the picture—Hunter sent me a smartypants note about how I should come down off the mountain and he’d spring for a free golf lesson at Farmington Country Club. The lady golf pro signed it also. Naturally I was curious.

  What was Mr. Wonderful up to?

  The golf pro trotted me out to the driving range and dumped the balls on the ground. Now, I don’t know how to play golf, but if there’s a stick and a ball, I’ll figure it out. So I started hitting these golf balls. Half of them soared high up in the air, straight and true and way out there. The other half soared up in the air and turned right, like little UFOs making ninety-degree turns.

  The next time I took a lesson we pitched and chipped. If I couldn’t drop the shot into the cup, I was furious. I hated pitching and chipping. In fact, I got so mad because I couldn’t sink the ball that I stayed out there for two hours, which made the golf pro laugh.

  I, however, was not laughing. Golf is an expensive way to make yourself miserable.

  Once she explained to me that the object was to get close to the cup, not make a hole-in-one, and that I was doing pretty well, I felt somewhat better but not completely.

  The next week we played nine holes. I liked that a lot.

  The week after that we had lunch. That was four years ago.

  I love her for many reasons, but best of all she makes me laugh.

  Elizabeth Putnam Sinsel, Betsy, has bequeathed to me her entire family, and there are a lot of Sinsels, Lehmans and Valiants, funny, funny people. There are also nieces and nephews by the bushelful, all of them under seven.

  Betsy descends from General Israel Putnam, hero of the Revolutionary War. What a pity Aunt Mimi is gone, because she could inflict the genealogy game on Betsy.

  The cats, dogs and hounds love Betsy, too. She’s not much for horses but she’ll ride sometimes, and one of my horses, Tommy Sundae, loves Betsy. He’s a sweet Quarter Horse, young, and he lets her do whatever she wants to do.

  Those horses are my structure. I love to rise before the sun, drink my tea, walk out and listen to them or call them over.

  Growing up with foxhunting, I’d always loved it and was proud to hunt with Farmington Hunt Club in Charlottesville. Over the years I’ve hunted behind many packs and have learned just when I think I know something, the fox shows me I don’t know beans.

  I always wanted my own pack of hounds. It’s a foxhunter’s dream. At the end of the eighties I made a concerted effort to study those packs hunting today in America. Mrs. William Moss, M.F.H. of Moore County Hounds in Southern Pines, North Carolina, answered my questions over the years. She always had the time to invite me over for tea and patiently listened to me.

  The closer I got to striking out on my own, the more I realized what a gigantic task I was taking on: opening land, landowner relations, building a pack from scratch, finding good hunt staff and praying I could show good sport—in Virginia yet! Since Virginia considers herself the center of foxhunting, I had not much room for error. Thank God, Dr. Herbert Jones, the dean of foxhunters in these parts, threw his hat in the ring with me. He’s been my rock, my sounding board, my hero.

  I’d learned a fair amount by watching Mrs. Paul Summers, Jr., M.F.H. of Farmington. She’s a great hunting master and knows more about bloodlines, not just on paper but how it all turns out, than many people who call attention to themselves. Jill, by nature reserved, lets her pack speak for her, and speak they do. They are well matched—good voice and perfect for her countryside. She breeds crossbreds and American hounds. When I lit out on my own she gave me twelve hounds, an act of faith that forced me to give my best. I couldn’t fail my own master.

  My other angel was Lynn Lloyd, M.F.H. of Red Rock Hounds in Reno, Nevada. Lynn will go down as one of the great masters of my generation, just as Ginny Moss is a giant of her generation and Jill an outstanding master of the succeeding generation.

  Without these three women I’d still be out there with a pooper-scooper. Jack Eicher, former huntsman at Farmington, now hunt staff with Keswick, also pitched in.

 
; I learned how many friends I have, and this overwhelmed me. It’s painfully difficult for me to ask for help, but I had to ask. There’s no way you can foxhunt without people’s help.

  By guess and by God, I got us going. A field of riders materialized October 22, 1994, in front of John and Rhonda Holland’s estate, Oak Ridge, in Arrington, Virginia. Off we went.

  We’re still running.

  Foxhunting, for me, is so spiritual that I find it hard to write about it. I only know you can’t be out there and not be amazed at God’s creation, how we all fit together on this great big planet and how fragile the balance is.

  If nothing else, foxhunting has made me determined to preserve as much as I can for future generations, not just of humans but of foxes, mice, horses, hounds, eagles—all of us.

  Someday I will write about this way of life and I will try to convey what it means, a sport thousands of years old. I wrote about it a bit in my novel Riding Shotgun, but I’d like to go further. In the meantime, I thank every single person who helped me, most especially Lt. Col. Dennis Foster at the Master of Foxhounds Association of America and Ben Hardaway and Mrs. John B. Hannum, who have taken us to the next level of hound breeding. Their work will be taken up by all of us of the next generation, with Mr. and Mrs. Martin Wood III leading the way.

  The characters who hunt, those hardy souls out there on horseback, delight my days. Wimps don’t foxhunt, so I am in my element. I have only to look around me and see people ready to get up and get over.

  I hope you have something in your life which thrills you as much as this thrills me. Life is too short not to be this happy.

  During hunting season we push off early. Hunting season is usually from Labor Day to mid-March. The hardest work is not during the season but in the off season. We have to bring along the green horses as we turn out the ones who have hunted all fall and winter. We walk out the hounds, work and play with the young ones and clear trails.

  Sometimes I can walk out on a regular schedule and sometimes I can’t. It depends on my deadlines, but I love working with young animals, hounds, horses, cats. The minute I get my pages done for the day I’m out of the house like a shot. Being outside is heaven. I’d rather pick cotton than work in an office, even though those bolls make your fingers bleed.