His stays at home grew briefer; his life elsewhere was, I know, a continuing story of restlessness and search. He sometimes wrote me. He always returned. However, he of course knew he had no real future among us, had possibly known it early on. Eventually, in 1947, he published a volume of his poems, The Cranes on Dying River. I have it still and read it over from time to time. Many of the lines I never forget. There are glimpses of the many places and times he had experienced.
How Frieda died and how the rain
Fell secretly in Oxford Street…
How Dorothea wept how quite
Impeccably at Havre the sun
Climbed the old wall and how the night
Came down the hills at Carrollton
He always said he loved the countryside around home, the natural beauty we grew up with.
I admire one poem called simply “1941,” which speaks of our forebodings in that year:
And now the cities of the mind
Lie darkened and across the sky
Doubts move like searchlights and the blind
Achieve a novel certainty …
In World War II Lawrence was recruited for language training in Boulder, Colorado, and went there with his wife, Jeane. He had been in school in Wisconsin, where they met. They had married only weeks before. His exceptionally high IQ fated him: he was assigned to study Japanese. Many failed but Lawrence made it through.
Japan from then on was to be his life’s work, in war and peace. He worked for years for the American Universities Field Staff in New York, spending two years in Japan for each one in the United States, writing long, informative reports on Japanese policies and culture, following with lecture tours in the States. He became a distinguished lecturer in Asian studies at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, author of several books on Japan. The Japanese looked upon him favorably. They honored him in an elaborate ceremony, naming him to the Order of the Sacred Treasure.
Overtaken by cancer in retirement in Washington, he found that Carrollton came to mind again. He would telephone me, and was finally to say that though he never had a sister, he had thought of me as one. He knew I had recently been to Mississippi. “Did you go out to the cemetery?” “Not this time,” I said. “Oh, you have to do that. You are more from Carrollton than I am, you know. It’s all right for me not to go, but you must always go.” (Of course, I had been right all along. No matter where I had traveled or lived, what books I’d written or awards I’d won, I was still his country cousin.) I promised that I would go to the cemetery. He went on: “You must see if our family plot is kept up. I send money for it, but I don’t know if it is.”
I made a special trip to Washington to see him, during his last days. I told him that to me he was always a brilliant boy, upstairs in that beautiful house, writing poetry. The thought came unprepared for, a spontaneous truth and occasion for tears.
As promised, I went out to the cemetery when next at home, and saw that the Liddell and Olson graves were tended. I wrote to tell him that they were, but before the letter arrived, he was gone. A brilliance like his should have been the town’s pride. I never heard that it was.
Do we blame them? Do they blame us? The truth is that in Lawrence’s case, despite his constant presence in our midst, the stamp club, the storytelling, and the music, there were never many points of meeting between the town and him, so nothing on either side really took place or was there for praise or blame.
Lawrence Olson was no longer among us, but in many ways he never was. He told me in one of our infrequent meetings that aside from my mother, the only person he valued in Carrollton was a fat old man named Milt Boone. Milt dressed in khaki shirt and trousers, and used to sit in a chair up at the courthouse. He was wonderfully friendly and conversant, but I never knew him very well. He doted on his niece, a girl I had been in school with named Janey Keys Ray. She was not often at home, having married someone from another town, but to him she was constantly present. He never married, I think, or had children. She was his family. He spoke at once of her. “Do you remember Janey Keys? She’s the sweetest thing in the world.” He would beam even to mention her. Lawrence praised him. “He was a human being,” Lawrence said.
17
“THEM”
OF course they were always around us, fully half of “us” was “them.” Jokes were told about them; their speech was imitated. Did we feel benevolence toward them, despite all this? Yes, and real affection, too; real friendships, though rare, were sometimes made. And hidden though such things might be, there were instances of real love.
The talk about them went on in lowered voices, so as not to “hurt their feelings.” They would always be somewhere near enough to hear, cleaning or cooking or coming in to ask about what we wanted done. “Don’t ever say ‘nigger,’” my mother warned. “Even if other people do, you mustn’t say it. Say ‘colored people.’”
We had a cook named Laura Henley. My first playmate was her boy, whose name was J.C. He came with her every day to work because she had nowhere to leave him. Unable to pronounce my name, he did the best he could. I was “Woo-wee.” We would stand together in the sun on the back steps, with the hot planks burning our bare feet. (Avoid the nailheads.) My mother said she could hear in her sleep what J.C. always said when we stood there: “La’, La’. Ope de do’. Let me an’ Woo-wee tum in.”
Once J.C. and I built a playhouse up against the back wall of the house. We took out saucers and some tin knives and forks and made mud pies, getting filthy dirty. Once we got chewing gum in each other’s hair and came in a total mess. My mother said to Laura: “You take yours and I’ll take mine.” The noise of our equal spankings and identical wails came from different parts of the house.
The greatest horror I can in all my life remember was because of Laura. Walking uptown she had been called to by a white woman passing in a car. Would she do some laundry? The woman later said that Laura had “sassed” her.
That night an unspeakable thing took place. We knew nothing of it, but just before bedtime, a voice called to us at the back door, out of the dark. It was Laura, some young black person with her, I don’t remember who. She was hardly able to stand. She was covered with terrible purple blotches, seeping out blood everywhere. She had something white, like a pillowcase, wrapped around her head.
Her story came out in broken phrases. The white woman’s husband had come to her house and dragged her out. The woman had held a lantern. Her husband gave the punishment. The instrument used was a board with nails in it. Laura could hardly stumble to our door.
Afraid for her, my father got Laura into a car and to the train station. He put her on the train that night with her companion. Where could she get medical help? Did we ever know? The fear was that she would be killed if she stayed in town. All my life I will remember her voice, the brown, home face of Laura, J.C.’s mother, contorted with her effort to get out any words at all, and the awful blue marks around the bloody nail holes.
Years later, when I came to write a novel that in the made-up terms of fiction brought in much that I knew by heart, I called it The Voice at the Back Door. Black people were expected to come to the back door. And many did come to ours, though not in such extremities as Laura’s: to collect wages due, or ask for or pay back a loan, to beg time off from work, to sell plums or berries, or tell of someone sick. But it was Laura’s voice I remember, halting and soaked with pain and shock, that sounds through all my days. “Didn’ do nothin’! Lawd know I didn’ say nothin’ like she said!”
Before Laura and before I was born, my young parents’ first cook was a remarkable woman named Aunt Lucy Breckinridge. She had been a slave Negro, owned, of course, by the Breckinridge family, though I never knew any of them and they must have left before my time. She lived out from town with her grandson David, whom she doted on, and after she grew too old to cook for anyone, she would come in to visit “her white folks.”
Aunt Lucy came straight to the front door, a privilege she had simply taken for
herself. She would tell all the news of herself and others to my mother, then go and get a plate of food for them both in the kitchen. She loved my brother, who was born during her time with us, and when his first child, Jim, was at our home during the war years, she expected visits and would sit the boy on her knee and talk with him. She had a fine cap of white hair by this time.
When her hundredth birthday came round—at least a hundred: not even she knew for sure—the Charlie Gee family gave a great reception for her out on their lawn. The whole town came and did her homage. She was forever one of us. She would make scuppernong wine and bring a jugful in each fall. It sat in our closet. If anyone had a fever, or was “running a low temperature,” a small thumbprint glass of Aunt Lucy’s wine was considered helpful.
After Laura, our cook was a daughter of hers, Mary Elizabeth, known as Snookums. Snookums was with us for many years. She never spoke a word that was not absolutely necessary. My mother once wanted to know from her what to do about mice. “Get a cat,” said Snookums. There were other monosyllabic communications for us to repeat and laugh about.
And what can I tell also of Dora, black and docile, and Mayola, a light-skinned, pretty woman, full of pleasant talk; of Nellie, who saw us through to the end of the line?
We furnished our cooks with a house far in the back, out near the barn lot, along the shortcut route to north town. I had never been inside. No one went nearer than the porch, to call sometimes or ask for some additional work to be done, or to learn where something was. But once when we lacked for help and put an ad in the Greenwood paper, a young black girl came out from Greenwood with a girlfriend. We told them to go and look at the house she would be given to live in. They went, but came back laughing. “You call that a house?” one said, and they left, hightailed it out of there, as the saying went, not to be seen again.
I went there myself then and saw what all these years “they” had had to live in. One spare unornamented room, a few shabby chairs, a tiny room off to one side with a rack for a mattress, a shed of a kitchen area out the back. I was filled with shame for us. During the thirties Snookums had earned two dollars a week. Had it never been increased?
My father did make improvements to satisfy whoever came next. I think the true state of things had escaped his attention, too. Though we always lived well, one would have to say, with a large house and servants and plenty to eat, there was never much cash for anything during the Depression. Also my brother had to be put through university. Tuition, fraternity, dances … times were hard, so they said.
Dora’s husband was a friendly black man named Robert. During the late forties, my father found a “place” in the Delta which was going for sale at a low price and bought it. It was thirty-five or so miles from Carrollton, set in Sunflower County, at a good distance as well from Greenwood. The land there was flat and rich. It had been regularly covered with floodwaters before levee systems were secure and only in recent times had the swamps been drained. It was muddy during the winter months, a peculiar heavy sort of mud called buckshot. Cattle mired in buckshot often died, unable to move out of it, simply trapped.
Mules in those days were necessary for plowing and planting the crops. Dad had some fine ones, sleek chocolate-brown animals with massive long heads, standing man-high at the withers, their hooves as large as iron skillets.
When cotton picking was done and the winter had started in earnest, Dad would send his foreman, Charles White, to the Delta place. He would load the mules in the truckbed and bring them to pasture on our property. Throughout the winter afternoons, lengthening toward spring, we could look out and see them grazing or walking in a herd from one part of the property to another, sometimes hidden altogether below one of the bush-covered banks that eased the property down toward the creek, but always emerging, a powerful band, peaceful.
One afternoon my mother (Mimi) and I drove in from Greenwood and found that someone had left the pasture gate open and all the mules were out. Dad was away on business; Charles, probably with him, was not in evidence either. There was no one to call.
At first, the mules didn’t do anything. They milled around for a while in the side yard between the house and the tennis court and we thought little of it, deciding to wait until Dad appeared, or Charles, to take charge. My mother said she hoped they didn’t get in the rose garden. We weren’t afraid of them, though anyone would have hesitated to go too near them.
I was drinking coffee and looking out the window when they started to move. They moved with one impulse, as though they had planned it, as perhaps they had. They headed for the drive, walking, with a powerful fluidity, as though one beast were on the march rather than numbers. Once in the open road they began to trot.
“The mules!” I yelled. “They’re heading uptown!”
Mimi ran to the front door. “Oh, my goodness,” she said.
We ran out and got in the car. It was a sky-blue Buick, and quite large. What did you do with eighteen head of mules?
Carrollton on that sunny quiet winter afternoon seemed to be asleep. Nobody at all was about on the town square, along the residential streets, anywhere. We drove slowly behind the mules, wondering what to do next. We thought we might nudge them along from behind, head them into some cul-de-sac where they might graze happily until we could get word to Charles or Dad. But the mules were annoyed when we came closer and began to trot faster. There was no telling where they might wind up. The only sound in Carrollton that afternoon was the clatter of those marvelous hooves.
They paraded round the courthouse, then trotted up into the Methodist churchyard. It was situated back of a brick wall and reached by some steps leading up from the sidewalk. The mules found this ascent easy. They milled among the cedars. One took bites from a shrub; others grazed. One got mad and kicked another.
They decided to leave. If we could only head them in the direction of home. I got out and waved before them, trying to turn them in the right direction. My mother edged in with the car. But the mules caught on, shied away, almost ran me down, warped around me, and entered the Presbyterian churchyard. Another move like that and they would pass the Episcopal church, and beyond that lay the country road to the far-off Littleton place, with the whole county to wander in beyond.
“Oh, my goodness,” said my mother. “What are we going to do?” We were sitting in the car, totally helpless.
It was the moment for a hero to ride up. One did. A dusty pickup, carrying in the back the usual conglomeration of old ropes, old clothes, and a sack or two, banged up beside us. A voice called, “Is them y’all’s mules?” It was Dora’s husband, Robert, coming home from work.
“They certainly are,” we said. Before we could say “Can you help us?” Robert was out, grabbing up a rope from the back of his truck. He went in among the mules.
They regarded him without alarm. He knew the head mule, how I don’t know; he just knew. He walked straight up to it, noosed the rope about its head, and in a light bound, mounted. “Key’s in the truck,” he called and started off home, the whole herd jostling for position behind, finally stringing out at a trot, great hooves pounding, great ears flopping, great heads swinging to a contented rhythm, past the courthouse, down the street past the Baptist church, turning at Mrs. McBride’s corner, proceeding past Miss Beauregard Somerville’s, the schoolhouse, the Olson house—back to home pasture, where Robert brought them through the gap, then got off and closed it.
I was in the pickup behind, with Mimi in the Buick bringing up the rear. It must have seemed quite a procession for anyone up and watching, and though no soul appeared, of one thing we could be sure: Carrollton was always up and watching.
My mother, being plantation bred, thought she couldn’t do without a cook. She never really learned to cook anything but cakes, especially fruitcakes, and goodies for Christmas. She made up the fruitcakes in large quantities, using enormous bowls the size of dishpans. When the batter grew too heavy with fruits and nuts for her to stir, she would call in the handyman
, old Bill Burkhead, from the yard.
Bill did everything for us. He was thin and wiry, bent over from toil. He was helpful and kind and knew how to do whatever was asked. I used to follow him everywhere. I had a puppy I loved, called Spud, a mud-colored mongrel. Dad did not want me seen with such a dog. Spud would follow me riding, trotting anywhere and everywhere behind my horse, but Dad thought for me to be seen uptown, trailed by such a common animal, was not a good thing. He made me give Spud away to Bill and got a purebred German shepherd puppy for me. This dog and I got along all right, but he wasn’t Spud and I never felt the same about him.
When I went off to school, both dogs took up with Bill. He was not to be seen coming onto our property but that both dogs had met and greeted him and were trailing happily along behind him, mongrel and purebred alike.
Bill came in the early morning to make the fires. My waking up on school days was always because of Bill, who would be bringing in “fat pine” kindling and firewood from the cold outside, kneeling in front of the grate to shovel the last night’s ashes out, lay the good-smelling wood, and light the blaze. I would go back to pleasant dozing for another hour while the fresh fire took hold, warming the room.
A more important person was Charles White. He worked many years for my father, almost like a partner. Truck driver, cattle herdsman, repair man, a grave, steady, and regular character. We were all a little in awe of Charles. He had a house to itself up on the hillside between us and the Liddell/Olson house, a wife, and a number of children. We seldom saw the wife or the children.
We were told later that Charles had had a long love affair with one of our cooks, but I forget which, and I don’t suppose we would ever have found it out, as in the kitchen he behaved in the same decorous way toward them all, saying little and eating quietly. Charles was said to be important in the black community, especially in the church.
Landscapes of the Heart Page 15
