I should have discovered language and literature, but it wasn’t there for me.
My high school was good in science, math, and grammar, but literature was stuffy and remote. There was no art, music, or language except for Latin.
I was told that Latin was boring and dead, but secretly I loved it and only in retrospect do I realize it was my favorite subject. Miss Tossie Thorpe, the teacher, was a frail old woman, a little wren, making bird noises. Latin was purely strange, an adventure into the unknown, with cryptic clues (words that seemed like English) along the path.
I had no example of what you could do with learning—except for shorthand and typing (which I took, dutifully, forgoing the third and fourth years of Latin.) Any idiot can learn to type, and I’ve had no call for shorthand, but Latin has been my most useful subject, I see now, and I regret quitting halfway through.
I’m afraid to review my twenties and thirties. Will I discover that my whole life has been frittered away in jejune pastimes? Should I continue filling these little books? In my old age will I need to keep it up? Do I want anyone to read these little albums someday? My life is not a page-turner, please. I suppose that ultimately then the desk diary has an ending. I don’t look forward to it. Will I be there to record it?
Although rereading my youth is embarrassing, I recognize that its limits turned out to hold some of my most precious resources, the details I would eventually draw on for fiction. They weren’t the ones I wrote down then. But eventually the particulars of my country background, the vitality of farm people, and the language they spoke energized and defined the stories I began to write.
Floundering and misdirection are the basic methods of writing fiction. It is all done from scratch, without a pattern. Keeping a desk diary is a way of imposing a simple order on the stream of the day, but fiction demands something different—an openness to possibility, to what matters. It needs a fierce sense of urgency.
My mother kept a sort of journal during the last several years of her life. She wrote in notebooks and filled up the margins, so as not to waste any space. Like me, she attended to the main events of the day, but with a big difference: She made sentences. She used verbs! I can hear her voice, her laughter. She describes taking her dog, Oscar, out for a walk one cold day.
“He took me sailing down the hill, was about to mess. After he done that he was ready to come back home. It wasn’t very windy but would cut you to the bone.”
She was entertaining the events of the day, living a day fully enough to remark upon it, to feel it again through recollection. Ultimately, I learned the essentials from my mother. Life is process. Writing is process. With words we defy oblivion. I ponder my grandmother’s little diary and a boxful of my mother’s notebooks, and it thrills me beyond words that I have been able to bring their stories out to the world. For all three of us, writing has been a response to a world that is rich in material even though bounded by farm fences.
I can imagine that in my last days I will still be writing down what happened. Maybe I will be studying Latin.
Wind in the north. In ventum Aquilonis.
Tempus fugit.
FROM Elvis Presley (2003)
Introduction
On August 16, 1977, when I learned that the King—Elvis Presley—was dead, I was vacationing in Nova Scotia. In the lounge at the inn where I was staying, the news came on TV. Stunned, I could only mumble some clichés. The bartender recalled the death of the actor Audie Murphy, a war hero of his generation. I felt far from home. Although I hadn’t thought much about Elvis lately, I now sensed there was a great hole in the American cultural landscape. Elvis had always been there, hovering in the national psyche, his life punctuating our times—his appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, his first movie, the death of his mother, the Army, his marriage, the 1968 “Comeback Special.” It seemed inconceivable that Elvis—just forty-two years old—was gone.
For me, Elvis is personal—as a Southerner and something of a neighbor. I heard Elvis from the very beginning on the Memphis radio stations. Many parents found Elvis’s music dangerously evocative, his movements lewd and suggestive—but when my family saw Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show, singing “Ready Teddy,” my father cried, “Boy, he’s good!” We had been listening to rhythm-and-blues late at night on the radio for years, and we immediately recognized what Elvis was about. We had heard Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup and Little Junior Parker and Big Bill Broonzy and Wynonie Harris and Elmore James. In the daytime we listened to big bands, pop hits, country, the opera, everything we could find on the dial. On Sundays we sang in church along with the congregation, and we heard plenty of gospel music—especially the Blackwood Brothers, who influenced Elvis so much. Elvis listened to the same regional stew, seasoned by the far-ranging reach of the radio, so when he emerged with his own startling, idiosyncratic singing style, we recognized its sources.
Elvis was great, so familiar—and he was ours! I don’t remember the controversy he stirred up because everything he did seemed so natural and real, and he was one of us, a country person who spoke our language. It was hard to grasp how revolutionary his music was to the rest of the world. And it was years before we could realize what a true revolution in American culture Elvis had ignited.
But now the King was dead. Two writer friends of mine dropped everything when they heard the news and rushed to Graceland, Elvis’s Memphis home, to grieve with the multitudes of fans. One of the writers snitched a rose from a floral wreath and still has it displayed under glass on her wall. The other helped himself to the newspaper that had arrived at Graceland the day after Elvis died—the paper Elvis would have read if he had lived. Elvis, who was taken seriously in a wide variety of circles, inspired such a need for connection. He mattered deeply to many different kinds of people. After his death, the world absorbed the story—the utter loneliness of his life, his grasping for ways to ease his pain and sorrow. It was a sad—in some ways a sordid—story, hard to take. Then the grief gave way to a nervous national joke throughout the eighties. Elvis had been part of American life, and now it seemed people didn’t quite know what to do about him. Elvis was ridiculed, reduced to a caricature in a sequined jumpsuit. In 1992, the post office held a contest to vote on the new Elvis stamp; we could choose between the young, pretty Elvis and the older, bejeweled Elvis. Of course we chose the pretty one.
Some people refused to accept the news of his death. Sightings were reported. He became a barometer of the culture, a sort of hillbilly voodoo doll. As in life, Elvis was both revered and reviled. In 1980, a scurrilous biography portrayed him as a redneck with savage appetites and perverted mentality, and of no musical significance to American culture. This character assassination undoubtedly helped promote the national joke. Many may have found it preferable to reduce Elvis to a symbol, because Elvis made them uncomfortable. For some, he represented the dark forces, a crude creature from the lower classes; for others, he represented innocence, and the destruction of innocence is an unbearable sight. Perhaps joking about him—transmogrifying him into a fat, drug-crazed hillbilly with gargantuan appetites—both alleviated the guilt and conveniently removed him as a subject for serious examination. But the nineties produced a steady stream of reconsiderations of Elvis. Peter Guralnick’s thorough two-volume biography helped to rescue Elvis’s reputation and restore an understanding of his music. Guralnick sympathetically portrayed a life that he called an American tragedy.
A few months after Elvis died, I visited the small two-room house in Tupelo, Mississippi, where he was born. It was now a museum, outfitted as it might have been when the Presleys lived there. It was furnished with fleamarket antiques—Jesus figurines and heart-shaped pincushions, a washtub, a washboard, a pie safe, a kerosene lamp, and dishes that had come free in detergent boxes during the Depression. But what mesmerized me was the glitter poster—glitter spilled on felt paper, forming the shape of Jesus, with a Bible verse. I hadn’t seen one of those since childhood. I remembered them from church. The poster
evoked a powerful memory—this fake relic, this reminder of the innocent, religious rock-and-roll artist who became a superstar like the world had never seen before. In the glitter you could imagine the foreshadowing of the sequined jumpsuit. The glitter poster, once ubiquitous in the South, was a little bit of fancy in a drab world. And it embodied immense hope.
V
Family History
Why do people write memoirs, anyway? I eschewed sensation and the penetrating exposé of the self. A good memoir ought to have a larger story, I thought, something beyond the typical personal saga of sexual awakening and the search for affirmation. I turned to history, the pioneers from the British Isles who moved down the Great Wagon Road to North Carolina and then westward.
My people, from a community called Clear Springs, were among those hardy travelers who stopped along the migration route and refused to budge or change much for several generations. My generation was the first since that perilous migration to embrace radical change. I discovered that I was a pioneer. In my childhood I spent summer afternoons sewing quilt pieces with my grandmother, who might have spent the morning picking shelly beans and drying apples in the sun, just as her mother and grandmother had done. But in a blink of an eye, I was off to a university. And just like that, I moved to New York City. Suddenly I was driving a Volkswagen through Europe. Then I was writing books, drawing upon my mother’s good humor, perseverance, and way with words. My mother was the real center of this memoir, Clear Springs. When I told her it had been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, she thought I said the Tulip Surprise. It was all the same to her. And really, that is so much better, so much more to the point, the heart and soul of writing.
—BAM
The Family Farm
FROM Clear Springs (1999)
It is late spring, and I am pulling pondweed. My mother likes to fish for bream and catfish, and the pondweed is her enemy. Her fishing line gets caught in it, and she says the fish feed on it, ignoring her bait. “That old pondweed will take the place,” Mama says. All my life I’ve heard her issue this dire warning. She says it of willow trees, spiderwort, snakes, and Bermuda grass. “That old Bermudy” won’t leave her flower beds alone.
The pondweed is lovely. If it were up to me, I’d just admire it and let the fish have it. But then, I’m spoiled and lazy and have betrayed my heritage as a farmer’s daughter by leaving the land and going off to see the world. Mama said I always had my nose in a book. I didn’t want to have to labor the way my parents did. But here I am, on a visit, wrestling with pondweed.
I’m working with a metal-toothed rake, with a yellow nylon rope tied to the handle to extend its reach. I stand on the pond bank, my Wal-Mart Wellingtons slopping and sucking mud. I fling the rake as far as I can, catch the pondweed, and then tug it loose. An island of it breaks off and comes floating toward me, snared by the rake. I haul it in and heave it onto the bank. The pondweed is a heavy mass of white, fat tendrils and a black tangle of wiry roots beneath the surface scattering of green leaves. Along with my rakeful of weed comes a treasure of snails, spiders, water striders, crawfish, worms, and insect larvae—a whole ecosystem, as in a tide pool. I haul out as much as I can lift—waterlogged, shiny leaves and masses of tendrils, some of them thick and white like skinned snakes. I rescue a crawfish. It wriggles back into its mud tunnel. As I work, the bank gets clogged with piles of weed. I am making progress. There is an unexpected satisfaction in the full range of athletic motion required for this job. I think about hard labor and wonder whether some of my fitness-minded friends with their rigid exercise routines could be talked into helping me out.
I’ve seen water lotus covering a lake, smothering it with plate-sized pads. Water lotus are giant lilies—double-story affairs that make gigantic seedpods resembling showerheads. Water lotus are a disaster if what you want is fish. Even without any lotus, this pond has seen disasters before—three fish kills: a fuel spill from the highway, warm-water runoff from a tobacco-warehouse fire, and a flood that washed the fish out into the creek.
In the early eighties, my father hired a backhoe to create the pond so that my mother could go fishing—her favorite pastime. He cut down a black-walnut tree so she could have a view of the pond across the field behind the house.
There used to be blackberries at the site of this quarter-acre pond—banks of berry bushes so enormous that we tunneled through them and made a maze. The blackberries were what we called tame. Back in the forties, my parents planted a dozen bushes to keep the fields from washing into the creek. The blackberries spread along all the borders. The berries were large and luscious, not like the small, seedy wild ones, but we never ate them with cream and sugar—only in pies or jam. Every July we picked berries and Mama sold gallons of them to high-toned ladies in the big fine houses in town. They made jelly. We got twenty-five cents for a quart of berries, a dollar a gallon. It took an hour to pick a gallon, and I could pick up to four gallons in a morning, before the sun got too hot, before I got chiggers implanted in the skin under my waistband. My fingers were full of thorn pricks and stayed purple all summer. The blackberries haven’t disappeared, but they used to be more accessible, less weed-choked. They grew up and down all the creek banks, along the edges of all the fields, along the fencerows, along the lane. My father burned down masses of them before digging the pond.
The pond feeds into Kess Creek, which cuts across this farm—the place where I grew up, and where my mother still lives. The farm is fifty-three acres, cut into six fields, with two houses along the frontage. We are within sight of the railroad, which parallels U.S. Highway 45. We’re on Sunnyside Road, a mile from downtown Mayfield, somewhere between Fancy Farm and Clear Springs, in Graves County. We are in far-western Kentucky, that toe tip of the state shaped by the curve of the great rivers—the Ohio meets the Mississippi at Cairo, Illinois, about thirty-five miles northwest of Mayfield. To the east, the Tennessee and the Cumberland Rivers (now swelled into TVA lakes) run parallel courses. Water forms this twenty-five-hundred-square-mile region into a peninsula. It’s attached to the continent along the border with Tennessee. Historically and temperamentally, it looks to the South.
There aren’t any big cities around, unless you count Paducah (pop. 26,853), twenty-six miles to the north. The farm is typical of this agricultural region. A lane cuts through the middle, from front to back, and two creeks divide it crosswise. The ground is rich, but it washes down the creeks. The creeks are clogged with trash, dumped there to prevent hard rains—gully-washers—from carrying the place away. At one time this was a thriving dairy farm that sustained our growing family. It was home to my paternal grandparents, my parents, my two sisters, my brother, and me. There were at least eleven buildings along the front part of the farm, near the road: two houses, a barn, a stable, a corncrib, a smokehouse, two henhouses, a wash-house, a milk house, an outhouse. I even had a playhouse.
The gravel-and-mud county road ran in front. Sometimes the school bus couldn’t get through the mud. Before the road was paved and fast cars started killing our dogs and cats, we would sit on my grandparents’ porch and say “Who’s that?” whenever anybody passed. My grandparents’ house was a large, one-story building with a high gabled roof—a typical farmhouse. The other house, a small white wood-frame structure that my parents built when I was four, stood on a hill in the woods. When the road was paved, the roadbed was built up, so the house seemed to settle down to the level of the road. We still say the house is on a hill.
The farm is one field to the east of the railroad track that used to connect New Orleans with Chicago. The track runs beside Highway 45, an old U.S. route that unites Chicago with Mobile, Alabama. Highway 45 goes past Camp Beauregard, a Civil War encampment and cemetery, and leads toward Shiloh, a Civil War battlefield, and continues to Tupelo, Mississippi, where Elvis Presley was born. On this highway when I was about ten, my dog Rags was killed, smashed flat, and nobody bothered to remove his body. For a long time, it was still there when we went to town—a hank o
f hair and a piece of bone. It became a rag, then a wisp, then a spot. It’s hard to explain the indifference of the family in this matter, for my heart ached for Rags. It had something to do with the immutability of fate. To my parents’ way of thinking, there was nothing that could be done to bring Rags back to life, and besides they were behind on the spring planting or perhaps the fall corn-gathering. There was always something.
When I was in junior high, a motel opened up on the highway. It was the first motel in Mayfield. I could see it from my house. Marlene lived at the motel. I envied her. The allure of rootlessness—strangers passing through, stopping there to sleep—is a cliché, but if you live within sight of trains and a highway, the cliché holds power. Marlene’s father built her a frozen-custard stand—to my mind the definition of bliss. It was a cozy playhouse on the side of the open road: a safe thrill. But Marlene was popular at school and grew too busy for any sidelines. Her father put an ad in the paper: “FOR SALE: Marlene’s Frozen-Custard Stand. Marlene’s tired.”
Long before this, back in 1896, across the field in front of our houses, an amazing thing happened. Mrs. Elizabeth Lyon gave birth to quintuplets. For a brief time they were world-famous, until curiosity-seekers handled the babies to death. The quintuplets’ house stood right beside the railroad track, and passengers from the train stopped to ogle. They were five boys—Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul. The names had come to Mrs. Lyon in a dream. President Grover Cleveland and Queen Victoria sent congratulations on the babies.
I am a product of this ground. This region is called the Jackson Purchase. In 1818, Andrew Jackson signed a deal with Chinubby, king of the Chickasaw Nation, and soon white settlers swarmed in, snatching up sweeps of prairie. Most of them came from Middle Tennessee, where the Cumberland Settlements had led to the founding of Nashville. One of the Cumberland pioneers was my great-great-great-grandfather, Samuel Mason. Several of his ten children headed for the Jackson Purchase, and four of them settled on Panther Creek, at Clear Springs, from whence all the relatives I have ever known sprang. In 1920, a century after my ancestors settled in Clear Springs, my grandparents boldly moved away from there, from the bosom of generations. The land had been divided up so many times that sons had to leave and find their own land. For Granddaddy, it was a long journey of eight miles. In 1920, he bought the fifty-three and one-tenth acres by the highway for five thousand dollars. The house, only six years old, was sturdy and attractive. The land was cleared and fertile, and it was only a mile from town, so trading at the town square or the feed mill would be an easy journey by buggy or wagon.
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