By the time I came along she was very much the chatelaine, a demanding mistress, quick, with a no-nonsense way of making sure she was listened to, obeyed, obeyed on time. She kept the keys tied with rawhide thongs to small cedar boards, labeled “smokehouse” or “pantry” or “woodhouse” or “tools.” These had to be returned by nightfall. From a country house, a cabin hastily enlarged after the old home burned, added to in haphazard wings and tacked-on porches, she fused and embellished a gracious, welcoming plantation dwelling, never a mansion, but beautiful to look at, serene to stay in. For this she had to have help in plenty, and her help admired, obeyed, but sometimes resented her. They did not cling to her the way they clung to him.
Out on the place, riding with my uncle, I noted how Negroes came to find him, sometimes in pairs, trouble on their minds. “You go on ahead, Lizzie,” he would say. So it was a marriage dispute. He wouldn’t think it suitable for me to hear. Nor would they have told it before me. I would ride ahead and wait. He would sit his mare, leg up perhaps, with loose reins, and they would stand near her head or at the stirrup, and he would listen, take off his cork helmet at times, scratch his brow, nod, following everything. Something would be, if not settled, advanced by the time they left, what I don’t know, but they would look more at peace, would have agreed maybe to come back and talk again. At other times, some scrawny woman would come up, or rather grow up, right out of high weeds, the pernicious Johnson grass that cursed that particular region, and complain that she didn’t have food to get through the month. He would stop his horse. “Lord have mercy, I done furnished you twice already,” he would say, but then the story would come up, rising up in all its detail. “Well, go on up to the store. Side meat and cornmeal … put it on the books.”
I also loved riding in wagons and got to do this frequently down on Teoc in the summer. The Negroes indulged me. They would let me take the reins and teach me to hold the team together for an equal pull. I knew all their bridling and harness, and how they were hitched up. An empty wagon is fun to ride because the mules are happy with the lightness of the load and enjoy trotting along in unison.
I may be the only person still alive who can ride standing barefoot in an empty wagon driving a team without getting pinched toes. Wagon boards are never nailed to the bed because the motion of the wagon jostling over uneven roads would split them. You have to take care to keep your bare feet centrally on the wider boards. I was once good at doing this.
In the late afternoons on Teoc, I would watch for the return of a man named Gold, whom I especially like to follow around. When he came clattering along toward the barns in an empty wagon, I would run out and call him. He would stop the team and pull me aboard. He would sit on the board seat so that I could drive alone to the barn gates, where he would spring down and open them wide for my triumphant entry.
Those were happy days.
Yet it was an ugly system, of course, enslaving, grown up after slavery and not possible, apparently, ever to lose. But in that childhood time of enchantment and love, it never seemed to me anything but part of the eternal. Might as well question why the live oaks were there, or the flowers in Aunt Esther’s garden, or the stars in the sky, as to say that Teoc could be run any way but the way it was, always had been, always would be. I myself was a slave more willing than any.
Once or twice, when invited, my aunt and I attended Negro services at the plantation church. We were solemnly made welcome. Later, during the thirties, the blacks on the place collected enough money among themselves to build a new church. It was neat, of wooden construction, with a modest white steeple and sturdy front steps. They named it St. Joseph’s Chapel for my uncle. Some left Teoc, but wherever they went to, they were apt to write him, either for money or about some problem. I remember one well, a field hand named Joe Willie, who left and went to Memphis. I saw him a year or so later, back at the place. “I thought you left us, Joe Willie,” I said. My uncle told me later that he had got into some scrape and got hit in the head. “Yes’m,” was Joe Willie’s version, “I went up yonder, but they tried to keel me, so I done come on back home.”
We rode all summer, often as much as twenty or thirty miles a day. Sometimes in late afternoon, when the shadows grew long, we’d race our horses along the levee road near the creek, and often my uncle would suddenly turn his mare and drive her straight up the levee to the very crest, where he would halt, take off his hat, and catch the evening breeze, looking out and all around, while I came trotting up behind to join him.
All the time, the life of that land and those people was going on all around us. There is nothing like it I know of today, and though we took it for granted as usual plantation living, I know now that even then it was rare. I have come now to see that my memories have more in common with country life as described by Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Turgenev than with the America of that time as we read about it in Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis. Enlightened as to its ills, as one would have to come to be, I could never deny that I loved it, or cease to look back on it with the greatest affection. I still claim joy as a good portion of its quality, and I love it still.
Uncle Joe was a great one for discussing books he liked. The McCains were brought up around books, always had books, talked about books, took characters from books into their lives. They enjoyed fiction mainly, though they had studied history in the schools and academies they attended, and everyone had taken Latin. Also mathematics, said to “improve your mind.” My aunt Katie Lou McCain, the elder sister, even taught Latin, in a town to the south.
Come to think of it, it may have been books which, if they didn’t teach us our traditions, had much to do with reinforcing them. Behavior and manners came to us from an eighteenth-century code of life. People in Carrollton often seem to have stepped out of Jane Austen. Authorities from the past stood in austere ranks—the Bible, the Romans, the Greeks. Our finest houses looked like classical temples. Our lawyers quoted Cicero. Our ministers knew Hebrew.
Books at Teoc and at home in Carrollton stood two deep in the bookshelves, and most of them were good ones, would be thought so to this day. It’s true that my uncle liked adventure tales, Rafael Sabatini, for instance; and my mother confessed to liking such books as V.V.’s Eyes and Queenie’s Whim, but for the most part the shelves were solid in their Dickens and Thackeray and Jane Austen and Hawthorne. My brother’s favorite book, read many times over, was Moby Dick. He persisted in believing it is about a whale hunt. I agree.
My uncle saw to it that I read every word of his favorite book, Les Misérables. When I was as young as twelve he sent me plodding through this tome, well over seven hundred pages long, in the edition he had at Teoc. His own enthusiasm spurred me on. He kept me at it. Fantine and Cosette, Marius, and most of all Jean Valjean himself were objects of his comment. He had thought of them a lot. He admired Valjean for his courage, his endurance, his masculinity, and his ability to grow, become greater than he was at first. He dwelt with some amusement on the love of Marius for Cosette. “He couldn’t eat or sleep. He grew thin and pale. Look what love will do. That’s how it is, Lizzie.” “Poor things,” my mother would chide. “It’s such a cruel book. They were all so poor. It can’t be good for her to read all that.” “It’s life,” he would say. “She ought to learn about it.”
He also admired Dickens, especially A Tale of Two Cities; the Evrémonde story was a fascination to him. Where did all this Frenchness come from? I’ve no idea. My grandmother admired Walter Scott, but Uncle Joe confessed that Scott bored him with long descriptions. Perhaps Hugo by comparison was more interesting, and the same went for Dickens when he didn’t try “to put in too many characters.”
During rainy days we sat and talked about these things. He liked Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice and thought that Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair was “a mean little devil.” He smoked Target cigarettes and let me roll them for him on a little orange-colored machine. The tobacco was spread in a small canvas trough, the fine paper set in place, and when I presse
d the lever, one rolled around the other. I made them for him fifty at a time, and he kept them in a humidor on the hall table.
Nothing gold can stay.
I grew, entered awkward adolescence, suffered through growing pains, made everybody as miserable as possible, including myself.
Aunt Esther developed a malignancy. Incurable. She died during my first year away at college.
For a long while Uncle Joe was blindly depressed. There were the drinking, the late nights, the gambling, the women.
But a discovery emerged.
Still in his forties, he was not only charming but desirable. He was a “planter.” Prestigious: a McCain. Slowly, he reawakened to life, but this time that life was himself, a new revelation.
Things were never as before, but they were similar enough still to be clung to, and many times to be enjoyed. He would take me out to his favorite restaurants at times, showing me off as his “latest girlfriend.” The owner of one came out to peek at me. Back in the kitchen she scolded him. “You robbing the cradle now. Shame on you.”
He had some questionable acquaintances. My mother got wind of one and reproached him at some length. He checkmated her easily. “She’s a good woman,” he said. What he meant by that phrase was not at all what she meant. But she couldn’t go further with it. There was a family meaning he had put to use—“a good woman” would certainly be approved. My mother gave up.
He took trips to New Orleans. He had sometimes gone before in the company of his older brother Sidney, whenever he was home from the Navy. Together they had created for me the vision of a glowing myth-city long before I had ever had a chance to see it for myself. When I first went there, early in my college years, I fully expected magnolia-scented air, walls draped in perpetually blooming bougainvillea, violet orchids opening by the light of scarlet moons. It was almost true. Uncle Joe often named his favorite restaurants and what he liked to order. Pompano en papillote at Antoine’s, shrimp Arnaud at Arnaud’s, and trout Marguery at Gallatoire’s. Don’t neglect Tujogues’s for lunch.
He still danced about at bedtime in his old pongee dressing gown, his “deshables,” as he said. Sang the old foolish songs. Enjoyed movies, books, pretty women.
And married again.
Had two boys, his pride and joy. General happiness.
Then, the accident.
How did it happen? His second wife, Rebecca, afraid of possible tornadoes, had got him to build a storm pit, a below-ground refuge. Water had got into it, and some snakes. Alone, he had gone out with the gun to shoot them. She had driven up to meet the school bus bringing the boys home. Midafternoon in winter, no one around, even the kitchen empty. He evidently slipped on some broken steps. A shot rang out over winter-quiet fields. A bloody period.
Teoc was never to revive. He had recovered its life once, along with his own; but without him there was no new life possible. Rebecca left, moved to Greenwood with the boys. I’m told the house was rented first to one family, overseers, then to others. The oaks were cut down. I never went there again.
My brother, bolder, or maybe more nostalgic, drove there once with his wife, to see it again. In the old days, on a happy afternoon, he and my uncle had buried a small store of articles inside the concrete support to a water tower—coins of that year, stamps, some newspaper clippings, statements they had written about themselves, all to reconstruct that time and place for whoever might come after, like capsule testaments shot out into space if time, say, is the space shot into.
But the house had fallen to ruins, and growth had come up so thick my brother could not force his way through to reach that spot and reclaim what they had so hopefully put there for the future to find and know them by. He came away with nothing.
6
MALMAISON AND THE
CHOCTAW CHIEF
AN upbringing in the neighborhood of real splendor is a gift of fortune. No matter how that splendor came to be there, whether from kin or not, its presence is always with those who ever saw it and knew it for what it was.
Malmaison. It was a house that was also a home, and takes its place among the great mansions of Mississippi, which, though mainly centered in Natchez, are scattered throughout the state. But it was different from all the others. Here comes history.
All I knew in my childhood was that Greenwood Leflore, last chieftain of the Choctaw Indians, had built the house for his wife, Priscilla Donley. Was there a need to know more?
First and foremost, it was there to be looked at, and look with astonishment and wonder was what you had to do, having followed a winding gravel road through thick woods for some miles from our own family place, also at Teoc, until a curve and climb swirled us upward, and a drive led us over a cattle gap, flanked by entrance pillars. And there it stood, rising up immense and palatial on its low, flat hilltop.
Two stories and a cupola. Massive white columns. Elaborately carved woodwork beneath the eaves. A grand entrance portico. A porch so large that rocking chairs set out on it looked to belong in a children’s playhouse. Long galleries for both stories ran along either side. There were many wrought-iron balconies. And the cupola! It was like a small ornate house set atop the mansion like a crown. Its doors and windows matched those of the house below. A walkway surrounded it, enclosed by wooden railings. It could be called an observatory, and perhaps the chieftain thought of it so, for from it one could look out over the whole of the Teoc country, most of which he owned.
What was inside? Leflore, himself three-quarters French, had a great admiration for French style. He had named the house Malmaison because, it was said, he admired the empress Josephine, who had so called her own home when she was put aside by the emperor. The doorway, when you entered, simply swallowed you. A majestic hallway opened gleaming before you, parlors on either side. The parlor furnishings were in gold leaf, upholstered in crimson damask. They had been designed and executed in Paris. There were enormous gold-framed mirrors, murals of foreign scenes, linen curtains painted with scenes of Versailles, Saint-Cloud, Malmaison, and Fontainebleau. There were Sévres vases, glittering chandeliers, tapestries, and an enormous rose-colored carpet, Aubusson, without a doubt. The china and silver, when set out for dinner parties, were so sumptuous it was hard to imagine them actually in use.
Who was this man, this chieftain? Why had he not only wanted all this but also been able to have it?
Greenwood Leflore was only one-quarter Indian, the son of Louis LeFleur, a Frenchman who came up from the Gulf Coast and founded LeFleur’s Bluff, a trading post which was later renamed Jackson and made the state capital. LeFleur married an Indian princess who was half French, the niece of the great Choctaw chief Pushmataha. Their son Greenwood was attractive, intelligent, and lucky. As a boy he caught the eye of a certain Major John Donley from Nashville, who ran a stage-coach route along the Trace from Nashville to Natchez. Donley adopted little Greenwood, took him home, and saw to his education. Years later, Greenwood returned to Mississippi with Donley’s daughter Rose as his bride. After she died, he married another Donley daughter, Priscilla.
Leflore’s portrait shows a narrow sensitive face, black hair, a fine straight nose, and remarkable large black eyes. It is the total awareness of those eyes that strikes the viewer. They express no sense of inferiority; they penetrate; they certainly command and may demand, but they would never beg. And so he must have been.
His father, Louis LeFleur, had been dashing, a heartbreaker, it was said. Greenwood might have been a bit like that too. There is an air of romance in all the stories about him. A will he left, witnessed by two McCains, his neighbors, provides for some various black children, though whether his own or not is unknown.
Among the Choctaws he had seemed at first a hero. He was elected chief while the tribe lived in their native lands of northwestern Mississippi. He was ambitious to lift their standards, and thought it best for their future to encourage them in white man’s ways. I read that he sought to stamp out witchcraft, stressed education, encouraged democracy.
But the Choctaws were already, by all accounts, civilized. They made excellent farmers and knew how to prosper. Their customs were already democratic. They became bitter enemies only when mistreated or betrayed. In general they lived peaceably, and in the early days they got on well with the white settlers.
But the settlers who were pouring in wanted everything. Promises were made and treaties were drawn up by the dozen, but all were broken. Removal was obviously in the future, and all that had gone before was nothing but delay.
Leflore, it was said on local authority, “got the best deal he could get.” Negotiating with emissaries from Washington, he won one concession after another from the U.S. government. Indians could stay if they wanted to. They would be given(!) some land. As the land was theirs already, this bit of generosity seems totally astonishing. Yet in the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, they were forced to cede it to the United States, which allowed them to have a portion of it back. The ones who decided to stay usually found themselves cheated out of what they had been allowed, but so it went, in treatment of the natives, way back then. The white race said, “It’s yours but I’ll take it anyway.” And they did.
What of the ones who left, moved by promises of a new rich land in far-off Oklahoma? The story of their removal is pathetic and shameful and need not be retold here. The uncertain winter weather played a large, unexpected part, and many white officials acted nobly, but on the whole their westward trek was a horror story.
After the cession of land and the removal of the tribe, the Indians turned against their hero. Rejected by his own, Leflore chose to enter the planter society of Mississippi, to establish an opulent lifestyle and take a prominent place among the white hierarchy. Did the naming of the house Malmaison touch on his sorrow at being thought a traitor, cast aside by his fellow Choctaws? I never heard it said, but have often wondered.
Landscapes of the Heart Page 4
