The first picture show I ever saw was a black-and-white Western at the Princess Theater in Mayfield. Mama and Daddy and I were ushered in late, into a hushed darkness, where people sat in silent rows, illuminated eerily by the foxfire glow of the usher’s torch. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I glimpsed the ornate carvings overhead, the sconces with jukebox lights on the walls, and the footlights that gleamed like lightning bugs. Buffalo thundered across the screen. I wasn’t afraid.
For a couple of summers, when my little sister LaNelle was a baby, our family saw as many as a dozen movies a week. We went to two drive-in theaters, each of which changed its double bill three times a week. We went every time the feature changed. The 45 Drive-in was several miles down U.S. Highway 45; the Cardinal Drive-in was on the highway within sight of our house. Children under twelve got in free. I managed to be under twelve until I was fourteen. Many nights Mama carried a dishpan filled with homegrown popcorn she had popped. It was oily, with some burnt kernels. Of course, we preferred concession-stand popcorn.
On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, we drove to the 45 Drivein, which was almost to the Tennessee border. We set out at that mellow time of day, not yet dark, when the glaring heat dimmed down. That was the era before daylight saving time, and night fell about eight. We rushed past the rendering plant, which emitted a gaseous blend of carrion and slop and bone ash and offal, and past the clay pit, a mysterious high-walled crater where trucks transported tan mud to the brickyards. We drove through Water Valley, where our water hauler lived. (He trucked water to our cistern.) After Water Valley, we passed Camp Beauregard, a sad spot where five thousand Confederate soldiers perished from the measles one frigid winter long ago. We whizzed past their graves.
As we approached the drive-in, we passed a little building perched at the edge of a bridge. We always wondered what it was—some electric transformer station or something—and we would try to guess. We came up with various notions: where trolls live; where they store highway stripes. And about then, Daddy would always say, “I hope they’ve got Bugs Bunny tonight.” Bugs Bunny was our favorite cartoon character. We’d always know it was Bugs when the cartoon began and the Looney Tunes circle was empty, for there would be a pause, and then Bugs would burst through the circle, chomping his carrot. He’d say, “Eh, what’s up, Doc?”
We loved whatever was playing—gangster shows, musicals, comedies, dramas. Gangster shows never made any sense, though. I liked the hurricane in Key Largo but didn’t know what the people were doing out in it. Daddy favored the shoot-’em-ups. He couldn’t keep still during the heavy action; he’d always root for the Indians and cheer when an arrow felled a cowboy. Both Mama and Daddy loved silly comedies. They laughed themselves sick, elbowing each other. They went into hysterics over the Three Stooges and Abbott and Costello. Daddy slapped Mama’s leg so hard she yelled. The Bowery Boys were favorites of ours. I adored their New York accent and tried to learn it. I was crazy about Huntz Hall, a klunky goof, and Daddy claimed to have been in the Navy with Leo Gorcey, the “chief.” This impressed me deeply.
My grandparents went to the drive-in with us only once. They dressed up as if they were going to town on Saturday. We took them to a Lum and Abner movie because we thought the country characters would be familiar. They identified mildly with the hayseed humor, but Granddaddy said later, “I never cared for stories.” I wondered what he thought about the stories in the Bible, and I decided maybe he was just looking for the moral in them. Now I realize he didn’t think of the Bible stories as stories, because there was nothing fictitious about them. They were the true history of the world.
We were addicted to our six nights a week. We just couldn’t stop repeating this summer pleasure—the charged feeling of scurrying into the car, the landmarks along the way, the dishpan of popcorn, the jaunts to the concession stand, and the play of spotlights across the screen at intermission. Some people installed spotlights on their cars just so they could shine them on the vacant screen. Mama wasn’t working at the Merit then, and we had a healthy new baby in the family. I was cured of pneumonia. Life seemed grand. Sometimes Janice and I sat outside on Daddy’s old Navy blanket, leaning against the front bumper of the car. The blanket was handy the time we couldn’t scrape together enough cash for admission. We rolled Daddy in the blanket and hid him on the floor behind the front seats.
We saw all the stars—Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride as Ma and Pa Kettle, Andy Devine, John Wayne, Spring Byington, Bette Davis, Fred Astaire, Vera-Ellen, Ronald Reagan, James Stewart. There were no ratings. We saw a naughty New Orleans burlesque show. And we saw The Prince of Peace, which was touted for weeks in advance. It was the life story of the Lord. At intermission salesmen hawked a book about Jesus. Another time there was a sex-education movie, so roundabout it could have been about installing storm windows. Again, books were peddled at intermission—guidebooks for parents, what to tell the kids. A voice on the car speaker instructed drivers to put on their headlights for a boys’ book and their parking lights for the girls’ book. Mama got the girls’ book but wouldn’t let us see it. Later, I sneaked a look, having located it in the bottom of a drawer. The booklet advised cleanliness and caution. There was a photo of a girl on her porch waving good-bye to friends who were going swimming. She was incapacitated by a monthly affliction, like something Granny might have gone through.
Most of the movies we saw ran along an easy avenue into our emotions. But Little Women affected me profoundly. I had probably read Louisa May Alcott’s novel five times, and then suddenly—seemingly for my personal pleasure—it came to life on screen, with June Allyson and Margaret O’Brien as Jo and Beth. The Technicolor images stunned me. The gold and ocher and red autumn leaves that blaze across the screen after Beth dies seemed to burn into my heart. To a child reading the novel, it is not altogether clear that Beth dies. Alcott tiptoed around the subject the way the sex-education film did with its taboo topic. Beth spoke of heaven and seemed to vanish like a Cheshire cat. There was so little concrete detail about her death that I cherished the absurd hope that maybe she didn’t die. The movie made her demise somewhat starker. And when Jo publishes her book, My Beth, the cover fills the screen and seems to scream out the loss of Beth. The book is crimson, with ornate old-fashioned gold lettering. I was flooded with the rich images of this moment at the drive-in for months, years. The movie was about the creation of a book, I thought. I had been writing my little stories in blue Double Q notebooks. In Little Women, Jo was always scribbling. I was determined to be like Jo, who went to New York to seek her fortune as a writer.
When I was in high school, we got a television. By then, I was busy with my studies and an afternoon job at the drugstore soda fountain, so television didn’t have the impact on me that the movies did. Mama and Daddy loved it. They had whooping fits over I Love Lucy. We stopped going to the drive-ins. Daddy didn’t see the point in shelling out money for shows when he could sit at home in his red leatherette easy chair and be entertained for free. He didn’t have to buy those paperback mysteries and Westerns anymore either. To him, stories and shows were, after all, just entertainment. But I had taken them seriously. In the movies, a new world beckoned to me—those neat shady streets of cozy neighborhoods, and the golden splendor of cities. Today I rent those old movies, the Technicolor comedies and the dark dramas filled with jailhouse stripes cast by Venetian blinds. I don’t remember most of them, but I keep looking for something familiar in them. I seem to recall seeing Beth’s picture on the piano in some version of Little Women. It was vivid and close, a substitute for her presence in the group of sisters. I wonder if Beth’s photograph on the piano would somehow look like me.
With the movies, my focus began to shift away from the facts of the henhouse and the oak trees and the Virginia creeper vines. Country kids knew all about mosquitoes and butterflies and frogs. We had held larvae and worms of all kinds in our hands. As a small child I saw everything up close. I saw how a flower bloomed; I distinguishe
d pistils and stamens and pollen. I watched doodlebugs working in a cow-pile, burrowing and pushing their balled burdens like tiny Sisyphean bulldozers. I identified bugs galore, though not by name. At school we didn’t have science projects—frogs, bugs. We didn’t seem to need them; the natural world was all around. Once, while climbing over a stile, I stepped barefoot on a gigantic stag-horned beetle. It was a surprising magenta color, and hard as melamine. I didn’t make a dent in its carapace. I knew crows and blackbirds and the kingfisher who visited Granny’s fish pool. I saw a giant snake doctor—a dragonfly—with translucent biplane wings and a long red tail. I knew lightning bugs. I knew the progress of acorns. I dissected maple wings in springtime, and I knew how to slip out fresh eggs from beneath a truculent hen.
I remember a hen pecking off the smallpox-shot scab from my arm when I squatted in the yard to pee. Another time, in the outhouse, I accidentally closed the door on a rooster’s neck—his head was in the wide crack above the hinge—but I noticed his glazed eyes and gaping beak in time. With our eager dog, I rounded up the cows, enjoying the easy rhythm of their plodding and frisking. Somehow, their turn toward home reminded me of Granny hanging up her apron to begin a new phase of the day.
There were always snakes—black snakes, milk snakes, copperheads, spreading adders. “Run for the hoe!” Granny cried. She could kill a snake with one whack—off with its head! She tackled snakes with the fervor of a preacher battling evil. Snakes were evil. “They’ll take the place,” Mama said. Whack, whack. No matter if they weren’t poisonous. They were the devil in disguise, literally and absolutely.
I knew cats. Mama Cat had several loads of kittens. We installed Mama Cat and her kittens in the playhouse, but one morning I found Mama Cat eating one of them. A jealous, marauding tomcat had broken into the playhouse and killed her kittens, so she ate them.
Smoky slept with me, and Granny disapproved. “Her lungs will be coated with cat hair!” she told Mama. I persisted in sleeping with Smoky anyway, and for years I believed my lungs were lined with cat hair. He was a Maltese-gray barn cat. One time Smoky swallowed a milk strainer, a cotton disc the size of a saucer. It fit inside the metal funnel Daddy used when pouring milk into his milk cans. Smoky yowled and complained for many days without explanation, and then we saw the tip of the milk strainer appear under his tail. Milk of magnesia finished the job.
All our cats were strays. They died of untreated illnesses or unnatural disasters—car wheels. Daddy had a way of jumping into a car or truck and simultaneously taking off backwards without a glance. He always kept a cat in the barn until it got killed on the road. And then another one showed up. He was partial to white cats. We had ponies, donkeys, horses, mules, goats. We rode them all and worked them all. We barbecued the goat and hung clover-chains on the jenny donkey and teased the mule. We kept hogs, who rooted for acorns in the woods behind the house and rubbed on the trees. Their rubbing and rooting killed many of the trees and thinned out the woods. The hogs ate kitchen slop, seasoned with the dishwashing water that had lye soap in it. Hogs found lye soap larruping good. On hog-killing day Mama ground up the leavings from the butchering, packing them with several hot peppers into sausage casings—little bolster slips she sewed on her machine. “I cooked the heads and finished up the hog killing,” Granny wrote one year in her diary.
I loved tiny things: bird eggshells—tiny freckled ovals and blue robin eggs, like eyeballs dropped out of the sky; the velvet-and-dust texture of a lightning bug’s torch; the sweet dots of ladybugs; snail trails; book mites; bird feathers alighting on a leaf—a blue jay feather, or the bright yellow of a goldfinch; locust shells—the transparent shrouds of the seventeen-year locust of 1953. They were cicadas, actually, not the biblical plague locusts; I collected hundreds of them.
Transfixed, I watched black widows prance. They wore the black shine of patent leather, the red hourglass blazing with time’s urgency. Giant gray spiders crouched at the deep ends of tunnels, their legs folded up, ready to spring. At the center of an intricate, geometric web, orb weavers posed spread-eagled, like Christ on the cross. The spiders could be cherry-red, soup-green, banana-yellow, spotted like tiger lilies. The large woods spiders carried clusters of babies on their backs. Spiders often startled me, with their grim stealth. The word spider sounded like “surprise.”
Spider bites. Snakes. Mad dogs. Rising creeks that washed away the land. Bee stings. Illnesses that afflicted the livestock. Frightful electric storms. Our little house was nestled among tall oaks and hickories, and we lived in fear that lightning would strike a tree and it would crash on the house and burn us up. While Daddy was in the Navy and Mama was alone with Janice and me, a heavy storm came up one afternoon. Thunder rolled and crashed—the lightning blared hot light through the hard rain. Mama prayed. We huddled under her wings while she pleaded for a miracle to guide us through the storm. We absorbed her fear. We clenched our eyes tight, and our shudders rippled out of the house, battling the elements. Mama’s grandmother had taught Mama to fear electric storms. Mama passed along her fear to us.
My goal in life was the assurance that the delights of childhood would never end. But in the very delights themselves sprouted the seeds of dissatisfaction. We were in steady conflict with nature. When Daddy rounded up neighbors and kinfolks to help him get his hay in, the timing had to be right. The hay had to be cut, dried in the sun, raked, baled, and brought to the barn before any rain might fall and spoil it. Sometimes, when a storm was approaching, the men worked frantically, far into the night.
Amid such struggles, I tried to make sense of our place on earth. If nature was our enemy, how could it be the source of some of my most intimate pleasures? What was truly important? What was liberating? Would my sisters and I have lives no different from Granny’s? How could we carry forth the values of thrift and family duty and apply them to the strange new situations we would face if we left? I was sure we would go. But did we have enough moral direction to know where to leap when we got to that enticing edge? Would we wind up being sent to the hospital in Memphis for shock treatments?
One morning when I was about eight—before such questions entered my mind—I was waiting for the school bus on the gravel road in front of my house. There had been an ice storm. Ice had built up on every leaf, every twig, every blade of grass—the world was a crystal dreamscape. I wasn’t enthralled by the beauty of the scene, though. For me, the landscape was to be tested, not ogled. While waiting for the bus in the freezing cold, I carelessly grabbed an ice-covered twig on a bush and broke it. But then I stopped halfway through, when I saw what I was doing. The twig dangled there like a broken bone, a twisted foreleg hanging from the joint.
After that, I noticed the twig every day as I waited for the bus. The twig did not fall off, nor did it heal. The ice melted. Spring came. The twig was still there, hanging dry and dead from a fresh green branch. Each day, I saw the twig, and it reminded me that I had attacked something for no reason. The idle act of breaking the iced twig, the satisfying snap it made, the way the twig hung from that bush for weeks, well into the summer—it came to trouble me, making me consider my pointless destructiveness. Most disturbing was the way the twig claimed my attention each day. What was it trying to tell me?
We were always destroying things, like bugs and weeds—anything that interfered with growing food or making clothing and shelter. Heedless, we children would kill bugs just to “see how they killed,” as we said. I gathered jars of lightning bugs and let them burn themselves out. I collected fishing worms and let them rot, writhing together, dirt-less in the hothouse of a jar. But breaking the twig brought the dawning of moral consciousness. I knew I was neither performing a useful task nor exhibiting thrift. I was mutilating a bush simply for the joy of the tactile. I didn’t even need to be bored or mean or purposeful. I just did it. For the first time, the possibility of depravity occurred to me.
In a way, I wasn’t surprised. As the months went by, this notion seeped into my consciousness. It
seemed to confirm my secret view of myself. Usually I was on top of the world. I was the smart little girl at school. My parents spoiled me; they gave me a dollar for every A on my report card. Overconfident, I charged forth, thinking I could do anything I wanted to. I thought the world was manageable—a habit of mind absorbed from my grandmother. With her own peculiar style, Granny managed her small realm according to its necessities, abolishing whatever didn’t apply. After Daddy came home from the Navy, Granny’s diary reads as though the Pacific war never existed. She had patching to do, grapes to seed for jelly, and peaches to work up. Chickens to kill.
But more than anything else, it was my mother’s energetic reach I emulated. Avidly I read about Amelia Earhart, Iceland, Australian aborigines, Abraham Lincoln. School—and more vividly, movies—told me about other human beings, worlds of them, in distant towns and cities and on alien continents. The postage stamps I collected were clues, the books and movies proof. I could do anything, go everywhere, have anything I wanted.
Secretly, I knew it might not be so. As I advanced through the grades, I realized that I might not deserve the privileges I desired. Down deep, I might be worthless; my heart sometimes felt like a vacuum. Sometimes when I went back to school after one of my long illnesses, I felt I hadn’t been missed. I wanted desperately to live near the stores and the library, yet I was so unsure of myself when I went to town that I didn’t know how to act. I wouldn’t talk to anyone or look anyone in the eye. One version of me was a little queen on a throne. But another was a clodhopper. At heart was the inferiority country people felt because they worked the soil. Making my small forays out from the farm, I began to feel the centuries of shame, the legacy from Adam and Eve, who had listened to the snake and lost their paradise—their capacity for childlike wonder.
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