From then on, awakened somehow by the words she had used, the sense of her return from far-off places, the climb up from young school to real school, the difference in her little girls’ dresses (one was now across the aisle from me), I could not wait for that book. Never had a Sears, Roebuck order been so fervently expected. I remember it still. It was a narrow, tall volume, bound in pink paper: One Hundred and One Best Poems. It may be (I don’t know) that she was never trained as a teacher. Laws about degrees in education came later. Mrs. Keenan would correct our arithmetic and give a passing hour to grammar and geography, but what she really liked was reading poetry. After lunch-hour recess was over, she saw us through some routine chore before she would open the pink book and read. I guess the poems were way over our heads. There were Shelley’s “Ode to a Skylark” and “Ode to the West Wind,” Kipling’s “Recessional” and “Gunga Din,” “Abou Ben Adhem” (I think she skipped that one), Browning’s “Incident at a French Camp” and “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix,” also Macaulay’s “Horatius at the Bridge,” even some Edgar Guest (skipped also). One began “I saw the spires of Oxford / As I was passing by / The cold grey spires of Oxford / Against a cold grey sky.” This troubled me as I had been once or twice to Oxford, Mississippi, and knew there were not any spires there to speak of, certainly not cold grey ones. There were softer poems like “Annabel Lee” and “To Helen” by Poe, and Sidney Lanier’s “Song of the Chattahoochee.” She would explain things to us about these poems. Some odd phrases would have to be spelled out. “A kingdom by the sea” was not a real place, only where the poet imagined it, though he might have been, it was true, near the ocean. Then why couldn’t it be a kingdom? Maybe it was, darling. There was also “Thanatopsis” by William Cullen Bryant. I couldn’t make head nor tail of it when I first read it, but I had a cousin, older than I, who knew and quoted poetry, though he went to a larger school in another town. He would fill in if I started something. When I piped up that I’d read the one about “So live that when thy summons comes …,” he went right on with “to join the innumerable caravan which moves to that mysterious realm where each shall take his chamber …” I finally caught on. It was dying that was meant. “Approach thy grave,” etc. Until then, the sound of the words, the stately march of the rhythm, were all I knew.
Each of these poems had a short preface of a few lines about the author, and a picture in a small oval of the poet’s face. Tennyson had whiskers, Shelley looked scared, Byron wore a white collar, Poe had funny eyes, Elizabeth Barrett Browning a fancy hairdo. Mrs. Keenan (or “Miss Willie” as some of us dared to call her) liked to read us “The Bells” by Poe. When she read it, swaying from side to side, repeating “bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells,” hairpins used to fall out of the nest above and scatter over the desk. She didn’t notice. Neither did I. I would feel uplifted, absorbed, not in that room at all.
She assigned us themes and let us write our own poems. This for me was easier than learning to swim or climb a tree. It continued and amplified my trance over the poems. The pink book, getting worn, was never far away. I had had stories read me constantly, since I could understand, but no one, I think, had read poems aloud to me before. Certainly not like that. Somebody in the family at home happened to remark that Rudyard Kipling had died. I took the news sorrowfully to Miss Willie. “Nonsense,” she said. “He couldn’t die without my hearing it.” She was right. What world was this of hers, where you heard at once that Kipling had died? I turned in themes and poems.
It was still fall the first time she came down to talk to my mother. I knew she was coming, and I was naturally excited. It was an afternoon in November, after school. I sat down with them, minding my manners and not saying anything—listening to grown-ups was my specialty—when I was suddenly asked to leave the room. I understood at once that she meant to talk about me. I think I tried to eavesdrop, but failed. I went out back and talked to old Bill, our handyman. When I returned she was gone and my mother had a complex look on her face. I still don’t know if she was glad of that visit or not. She had probably been completely happy with Miss Jennie. I later learned that I was to be thought of as “talented,” “imaginative,” and so on— all those superlatives Miss Willie had to give, and all the backing her old family name could bring to bear on them. To me, her opinion, right or wrong, simply flowed out from the poetry, the bells, bells, bells. It joined me more than ever to the poems, and along with them, to Miss Willie and that outer world she came from, saying “literature,” and “darling,” and knowing when writers died.
At a students’ program in the evening before school let out that spring, I was asked to read a story I had written. Miss Willie read it for me, as I was too timid, and the cry of the small town audience was “Author, author!” I got up to be applauded, but what I felt about this, and the reason I couldn’t read my story aloud, was by now a solitary thing, which frightened me because it was powerful and could not be shared. It had already separated me from my schoolfriends, and I became for a time an outcast, ostracized and mocked at, my blue tam stolen, my books and homework hidden, the road to school and back a miserable trek among cold mud puddles.
I was reading the pink book alone in the living room one day when my brother, seven years older, came in. He asked what I was doing. I told him just to listen and began to read aloud. He seized the book, tore it from my hands, and began to read the poem in a high voice, leaping around. When I reached for the book he hurled it across the room and danced out, waving his arms in some sort of triumph.
My father was worried about money. My mother, I think, was worried about me. In the summer, I kept writing stories. I used to go to secluded places among the woods and bluffs that were part of our property, ride my pony down to the creek, lock notebooks away in my room. One hears of the joyous discovery of new worlds, but to me this is glib. There is no denying that my newfound ways were causing me miseries of loneliness, pangs of feeling “different,” evasiveness, and secret anxieties. I showed things I had written to my mother and sometimes to one of my jollier uncles, but it would be many years before I found any real community, or even knew that such a thing existed.
The Keenans moved away. Perhaps Mr. Keenan sent for them. Their going was not a real surprise, and I don’t remember it as painful. Meade and Frances had sometimes come down to my house to play. I think I always understood that they belonged to the somewhere else they had come from, were among those few who looked outward. Yet even those who go away have ties they don’t lose: the day a request came for me to write about some teacher—“some particular teacher who got you impressed with literature and writing”—I received a letter from California from someone I’d never heard of. Who was “Kay Keenan”? It was Miss Willie. This letter was the first I remember getting, though she’d left our little town in the early 1930s. Miss Willie, now eighty-nine years old, now known as Kay. She enclosed the last letter she had had from my mother, who died in 1974. Evidently they had kept in touch, my mother as fixed in place as Miss Jennie; Miss Willie, the wandering one, outward bound. Sure enough, she was leaving California for Virginia, and hoping I would write.
It was then I started remembering all the above.
How much she had let into my mind, simply by being herself! I do believe many things that have happened since are a working out of what she started.
Once I mentioned to my mother that Miss Willie had said the story of Adam and Eve in the Bible was “just a story.” (She had actually said this rather casually, not in the manner of teaching anything or imparting some startling truth.) My mother, however, was terribly alarmed and told my father, who took a grave view of it. “With that kind of talk,” one of them said, “she’s leading those children astray.” I guess she did.
14
GROWING PAINS
IT came as an unhappy surprise to me that I was not popular at school. I had to learn how sheltered I had been (not to say spoiled?), and I had to encounter the meanness of othe
r children. Nothing had prepared me for this, though my brother’s bullying ways might have done so. I was full of innocent good will toward new people, which is not to say I could not sulk, wail, and act in a variety of ugly ways at home when things didn’t go to suit me. I might risk refusal, scolding, and even spanking, but comforting love was always around the next corner at home. School was different. There are lessons waiting for everybody, of the kind not found in books.
First I had to learn snobbishness—to learn what it was, I mean; I was never to learn to be snobbish. I had always been told to be democratic: my father thought it would be bad for business to be otherwise; my mother believed that looking down on less privileged people was simply not right. My grandfather had told all his sons: “The measure of a true gentleman is his behavior around those he thinks are his inferiors. The important word,” he would add, “is thinks.” And so the scorn by town children for “country children” came home to me for the first time. I was a town child, but did this mean mocking at others? “If you like so-and-so, we won’t play with you.” Such threats were common.
Other problems multiplied. In no time I got labeled as “smart.” This was certain death. I had been a fragile child, frequently ill, and my mother, an excellent reader, had got me hooked on stories she would read aloud to me from marvelous books. I thought in school I would not only learn to read for myself, but also get to read more and more, and so in fact I did, but showing that I liked it was not at all the thing to do.
Of course, the teachers loved me, another source of social death. What was worse, I liked the teachers. I felt I could talk with them. That was unheard-of, a grave mistake.
I was “different” in other ways.
My mother had ordered some wonderful boots of fabric and leather I was to wear on wet days. They were hard to lace, and the teacher in an early grade would keep me there until we both worked out a way to fasten them so as to send me home looked after in the way my mother wished.
At first I was the littlest of students, condemned to the tail of the line when we played Pop the Whip. (This was a running game formed by a chain of players from tallest and strongest down to the tiniest. When a high speed was reached, the leader stopped dead and swung the line in a wide arc. The three or four unfortunates at the end would go tumbling and sprawling over the grass, trying to hold on, but failing.)
Like the beanstalk in the story, one night I grew. All at once, I was taller than anybody my age, as tall as girls in high school. My parents expressed alarm to think I might not stop growing, but when I had reached a certain line on the doorframe, my genes were satisfied. I was not. Though by today’s standards I was not very tall—slightly under five-eight—to myself the height seemed ruinous.
To children’s parties, once school began, I wore the pretty dresses my mother was proud to see me in, flowered challis in thin wool in winter, with a broad lace collar, but no one else dressed that way, and I often found myself in a corner alone. Perhaps being a skinny child with grown-up manners left me without a hope of belonging. It did not matter in the least that the whole town flocked down to our tennis court every summer. School was another game and I played it badly.
Added to my misery, a clear fact dawned: The boys shunned me. I didn’t behave, didn’t look, the way they felt right to be with? Was my family too strict by reputation (Presbyterian)? Had we such a special idea of ourselves (well-known relatives high in military circles) that I was to be set apart? Had I played at being tomboyish too long—riding horses, climbing trees, spending summers at Teoc—while all the time a crowd was forming here in town that did not include me? I didn’t know, but suffered.
One Saturday I was walking home alone late after going downtown. I must have been about twelve or thirteen. I was going to take the shortcut up from the road to our house, the back way, which led up a steep path past the barn lot and stables. Along the road a carload of boys I’d never seen kept honking at me and following. They were piled into an old-fashioned open car, a four-seater. I walked on, but when I turned to climb the hill, at a point about halfway up, I heard the honking again. I looked back and there they were, waving gleefully. “Hey, baby, how ya doin’? We’re coming up to find you tonight!” In a flash I thought: I’m a girl.
Even to think of books makes those of my childhood come trooping back. I can see them to their very bindings, the pictures and pages with the corners worn from turning. There was one called The Wonder Book of Myths and Legends, full of Greek gods, goddesses, and heroes. The picture on the front was of Chiron the centaur, who had trained the Argonauts, standing on a rocky shore, waving goodbye to the proud ship bearing Jason and the heroes as they sail out to find the Golden Fleece. Inside was also Bellerophon, mounted on Pegasus, about to spear the fearful Chimaera through the heart.
Perseus killing the Medusa was another favorite. As well as in the book, he could be seen nightly, having wound up among the stars. Years later I saw him again with glad recognition on the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, holding high the awful head crowned with snakes. Cellini, too, had heard his story.
Then Cupid and Psyche. I could hear it read dozens of times, never failing to grow breathless at the vow she made and broke when she took a lamp to see the face of her sleeping lover. I still have the book, pages yellow from use, binding held together with adhesive tape.
Another book was A Boy’s Life of Arthur. The sword in the stone! How wonderful to read of that boy riding back to fetch a sword for his uncle, and how easily he drew it from the stone, thus learning of his kingship in this innocent way. Then we had The Adventures of Robin Hood, about that nice rowdy bunch, loyal to one another, living in a forest.
Foster’s Story of the Bible was another book of wonders, not that I disbelieved it or dismissed it as “made up,” but that I believed all the others too: they seemed to me actual accounts, and I fantasized stories of David the shepherd boy, right along with Robin Hood and Apollo. But much of the Bible was frightening. Illustrations for the stories showed fire falling from heaven, cities burning, the earth opening to swallow up sinful priests, bears eating children, floodwater drowning thousands of people, tortures and plagues and slaughters. It was good to have fairy stories, with their mainly happy endings, to fall back on.
Later we came to Peter Pan and Wendy, Lewis Carroll, and any number of others. The happenings, clearly visualized from the pages of these books, became as real to me as people and events I actually experienced.
Because I had such mythic worlds as company, the outer world, so often a strain to be in, could all but vanish. Running out of stories, I would invent them, tell them in a whisper to myself at night. And out ahead waiting for me when I learned to read and write was an important discovery, which happened this way:
The first time I wanted to write something down there was a fire burning in my grandfather’s room. (One burned there regularly, as in the other rooms we used in winter—we had no central heating in that entire town that I ever heard of.) Watching in fascination how the light of the fire flickered, rising and falling, dwindling and returning, on the walls and ceiling, I felt I had to put this particular sight down on paper in some way. I was so urgently impelled to do so that I could not sleep for thinking of it.
The next day, I tried first to draw it, but thereupon discovered for good and all that no design or picture, inner or outer, would ever get from me onto another surface. So instead I wrote a poem about firelight. With this act I stumbled on an amazing truth, which came as a total surprise. A word, one or two or three or more, actually connects inner to outer. It joins what is seen to what is there within that sees it. It fixes what is felt.
Such an exaltation did I feel after this discovery that my mind became like a boiling pot—I couldn’t wait to do it some more. Feelings so often squeezed up inside me could find a way outside. The stories I saw happening in my head could get out of there and onto an outer surface, a page!
I was half crazy with the discovery. I sat on the floor before th
e fire the next morning, holding in my lap what I had written down. I guess I must have shown it to somebody, because somehow or other the word got out this early on that I liked to write. Well, my aunt Katie Lou and my uncles when younger had written things as well. My uncle Joe teased me: Georgie, he called me, after George Eliot.
Now when I went walking by myself out in the woods on our property, I would take a notebook along and write down stories and poems I had invented. I used to hide these ruled tablets with a pencil inside, and go and find them to write more, a continuing story, dropped and picked up again. My inner world was coming out. But only by slow degrees. For one thing, what I wrote was imaginary; it was not about myself. Most of what I wrote I showed to no one, and I have forgotten nearly all of it.
Forgotten or not, it went on like an underground stream that came up at times, only to slide out of sight, but never not to be there, somewhere, able to surface again. Still, it seemed something not exactly myself, more like a contact I had made with another sort of life, which I now was carrying around with me. And this current was itself in touch with the noble qualities in what I read. It suffered by comparison, of course, but it was part of that world.
The teachers we had were underpaid, but we had good luck nonetheless, Carrollton being a known place where genteel families lived. One of the best teachers had come there because of marriage to one of the Arrington boys. Elizabeth Arrington was a graduate of Agnes Scott, an excellent college in Atlanta, and could teach Latin, highly prized by all the old families in our town. By grade eight I had finished the first- and second-year texts and was reading Caesar.
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