Modern American Memoirs

by Annie Dillard

  It never seemed to matter that no one the Reverend Biddle touched ever got better, recovered, reported a cure. No one really cared. No one seemed the worse for it—no one, that is, except Biddle, who boiled his hands in lye water three times a day and who had stopped sleeping at night. He dreamed of dead cows littering the highway.

  One of Biddle’s few escapes from his great burden of divine power was getting into his two-tone green Pontiac once a month and driving as fast as hell out to Trail’s End, because Emerson and Albert thought the good reverend was kind and thoughtful rather than aloof and divine. While they thought he was a good man, they didn’t believe he had the power to raise dead cows, especially Haysberry’s old cow, which they knew for a fact had a habit of napping out on the highway. The asphalt held the heat and she liked that.

  Still, walking about with the perceived power of immortality in his fingertips was a grave responsibility, one that the Reverend Biddle learned to shoulder with dignity and humility, even when the religious pilgrims who sought him out were less than satisfied.

  “Ouch!” bellowed Garland Nobben. Nobben had sunk to his knees in front of the Reverend Biddle as he ate at the café. Nobben rubbed his forehead and climbed to his feet. “I asked you to save me, Pastor, not kill me, for God’s sake!”

  “Have you faith, brother Nobben?” mumbled Biddle, biting deeply into a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich.

  “Naturally,” said Nobben reverently.

  Biddle wiped a dab of mayonnaise from his lips. “Then go forth, read your Bible, lead a good, clean, and righteous life, and you will be saved, dear sir. I assure you.”

  After one such encounter, Biddle hopped in the Pontiac and drove like a madman out to the farm, showed up like a peddler wracked and bent from his load of pots and pans, a man of God seeking temporary refuge from his cargo of redemption, his flock of unquestioning believers. As the door opened, he almost fell into Emerson’s arms. Slowly, he made his way to the big room, shed his stern black coat and collar, sank into the rocking chair and leaned his head back, his moist, tender eyes red with exhaustion, salvation’s endless turmoil. He sat like this, like a reptile on a warm stone, for perhaps half an hour, letting all the tension in him dissipate, siphon out of his muscles like poison. Suddenly, he straightened up in the rocking chair, moistened his lips, began to speak.

  “Wait!” Albert yelled, throwing his arms up in irritation. “For chrissakes, Biddle. All these years and you still can’t keep the routine straight, can you? First the wine, then the sermon and so on.”

  Biddle laid his head back against the chair and whispered, “Yes, Albert. First the wine.”

  Albert made fruit and wild berry wines in the old copper still in the barn. There was always a big clay jug cooling in the waters of Starlight Creek. The jug sat on the bottom of the creek, secured by a rope tied around its neck at one end and a nearby gum tree at the other.

  I fetched the jug, pulled it up out of the cool creek water, and we all gathered in the big room and the men drank the wine from large water glasses while eating a good meal. The old men always tried to have something special for the reverend. Perhaps some fried quail and lima beans and cornbread, or a stuffed wild turkey with rice and gravy and fresh biscuits, or maybe just a good plate of beans and bacon, with fresh bread, butter, and plenty of cool wine.

  And at last, Biddle took off his hat, revealing the perfectly round bald spot on the crown of his flushed head, a spot that gleamed, everybody said, just like a halo. Just another sign, boasted the proud members of the Mount Hebron First Primitive Methodist Church, that Conrad Biddle was no ordinary man. He had truly been touched by the hand of God.

  The Reverend Biddle was neat, efficient, a man of telling ecclesiastical aplomb, who was against evil and for good, though he often, said Emerson, got the two confused. The old men felt sorry for him and worried about his fragile health. After all, should he die, who would be around to touch him and bring him back to life?

  Biddle, in turn, worried about the old men. He even worried about Elias Wonder, even though he believed Wonder was moonstruck, crack-brained as he had ever seen, and therefore beyond whatever good his prayers might do for him. Biddle was greatly troubled about the old men because if he failed to save their tortured, misguided souls, they would spend eternity in the bowels of hell. It bothered him even more deeply that Albert and Emerson were so calmly resigned to doing just that—dying.

  Biddle cleared his throat, couched his words in a cloak of deadly gravity. “But don’t you know what waits beyond the grave for the unforgiven,” he implored them, a drop of wine on his bottom lip.

  “Rot,” answered Albert cheerfully, as though he were the only child in a classroom who knew the answer to a difficult question. “Followed by ripeness.”

  REYNOLDS PRICE (1933- )

  Reynolds Price grew up in North Carolina and, except for three years at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, has lived all his life within sixty miles of his birthplace. He is James B. Duke Professor of English at Duke University.

  Price has written ten novels. In 1962, his first novel, A Long and Happy Life, won the William Faulkner Foundation Award and the Sir Walter Raleigh Award. In 1986, Kate Vaiden received the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction. He has written poetry, too, and five plays.

  His most recent memoir, A Whole New Life (1994), takes up his battle with spinal cancer.

  This story about his uncle appears in his 1989 memoir, Clear Pictures. His uncle Macon Thornton is a tobacco farmer in Macon, North Carolina. His name, Mac, for Macon, is pronounced “Make.” Delbert is his tenant farmer, and Spencer the farmer’s son. Ida is young Reynolds’s beloved aunt, with whom he spends his summers. Emma is the widowed sister with whom Mac Thornton, a bachelor, lives.

  from CLEAR PICTURES

  In my hearing Mac never delivered so much as a line of agrarian thought or primitive poetry; but the way his lively face would halt, then go serene for maybe ten seconds said more than any bucolic of Vergil’s or any hundred seminars at the State Ag. and Normal; and even a town-boy, bookish as I, could watch it and wonder how many people found that much peace in a lifetime’s work.

  Even to a half-bored watchful child, Mac’s days plainly said that something could speak, through dirt and leaves and human sweat, and give a sane man this much return. I knew that money was partly involved, though I was still too young to care much for money. I couldn’t speak for Delbert or Spencer, but I knew from far back that Macon Thornton was not in this for anything as solemn and joyless as money. I’ve already said that Mac never flaunted wealth nor was he a skinflint. For all their faults, none of my grown kin were in love with money. Though again, I was born in the pit of the Great Depression, I never heard within my family a whole conversation on the subject of money. There’d be little snatches of worry about a bill, little dry quick laughs at the specter of loss; but money was neither their goal nor theme.

  I also knew what I couldn’t have said, that Mac lived as pure a life of contemplation as any cloistered monk. I never saw him engaged in harder work than saddling a horse or stepping off the dimensions of a field, but that’s not to say he was lazy. He kept the standard farmer’s day, sunup to past dark and then early sleep. On an average day he’d visit two farms, overseeing and guiding, encouraging and curbing. To one he’d haul a load of fertilizer; to another, lime and chicken-feed and maybe a case of Carnation milk for the bottle-fed baby that seemed to be failing. He’d listen and watch, laugh and console. It was all the business he’d made for himself but also a steady brand of meditation.

  The only visits that gave him obvious worry were the ones to Uncle Will Egerton’s widow, who was prone to wildness and was also named Emma. Even in youth and in a tolerant village, she’d been known as mean. Ida told me that one freezing morning a black man knocked on Uncle Will’s door with a message. Mrs. Egerton had just come from the well with a five-gallon bucket of water. When she saw the man standing there, she suddenly dashed all the water in hi
s face (her explanation was “He looked like a fool just standing there grinning”). By the time I was riding with Mac, she was well into a clearly deranged old age. She wouldn’t live with the Thorntons, or maybe they couldn’t have stood her; so Mac had the duty of finding decent white families in the country to give her room and board and the necessary curbing.

  I recall a particular day in the late forties when Mac and Joe came to get me, and we headed out for the Snipes place where Mrs. Egerton had been staying with apparent satisfaction. A straw had finally broken the Snipeses’ back; and they’d sent a postcard for Mac to come get her—the previous Sunday in church, she’d noticed that her dress was wrong-side-out; and when most heads were bowed in prayer, she’d simply stood up, stripped off the dress and put it on the right way. When we got there, Mrs. Egerton was waiting on the porch with her Gladstone bag—tall for her age, with wild white hair from under her black hat, dying gardenias pinned to the brim. I can’t recall where we took her next. But as always she and I rode in the bed of the pickup on straight chairs; and she ate from her inexhaustible bag of dried Smyrna figs, “Good for your bowels, boy; here eat you one.”

  On the way back to Ida’s in late afternoon, Joe would stop us downtown for the mail and a drink; mine was always Nu-Grape that left a purple arc on your upper lip. Mac and I would stay in the store, by the checker game, and drink ours slowly beneath the fan—Mac watched but never played. Once Joe got his drink, he’d go outside where black men sat on the window ledge with cold drinks and cakes (no signs were posted, no word was said; but everybody knew blacks sat outside).

  So I’d have Mac alone for the first time today, and that was my chance for a swift operation. I’d beckon him down and whisper fast. I’d seen an ad for a microscope in one of my funny books, $2.98; it would help me in school.

  Mac would nod “Yes, yes” but make no move. So I’d be left to wonder if he heard or had just said no. In fact through the years, my least request, if it sounded “educational,” was sure to be met. Mac seemed to read nothing but the Raleigh paper and maybe a few farm publications; and I seem to recall him telling stories of a year or so at Trinity College down in Durham, later Duke University. So his own education was hardly extensive, but he firmly backed my interest in school. His last word to me as I left each summer was “Be smart, Ren. Any damned fool can fail. Look at me, dumb as dirt. You be some count, hear?”

  And there in the store, among six or eight white men watching a game, he’d palm me a wadded five-dollar bill with one long hushing finger to his lips, “Don’t tell Emma, hear?”

  At the end of my visit the summer I was ten, Mac came by to see me on my last afternoon. The pickup stopped out front in the road, Ida called me and I ran out to find Mac alone at the wheel. He said “Let me show you a pretty sight.” I was more than ready, but he made me run back for Ida’s permission. Then we turned and headed for the fields by the Baptist Church, the ones more or less face-to-face with his house. More tall tobacco, all he had to show; I could hardly act thrilled. Still I climbed out with him and walked down a row till we came to the end by the curing barns, the scene of catfish fries and Brunswick stews in hundred-gallon iron pots. From there Mac faced the road and said “Can you see Mrs. Nowell?” He always referred to his sister Emma by her married name, and it was time for Emma’s late afternoon pause on the front porch.

  Short as I was, I told him I couldn’t see anything but green.

  Mac said “Which one of these rows you like the best?”

  He’d tried to teach me to judge tobacco, so I eyed it slowly and finally said “This one.” The row stretched in a clear line right on to the dirt road, a hundred yards.

  Mac said “Then it’s yours. In late September you watch the mail.”

  I barely understood.

  Then he led the way out and drove me back. We exchanged the usual farewell—his admonitions to “be some damned count,” my thanks for good times and the microscope. Then we’d part for long months, no hug or handshake. I’ve said his eyes were blacker than any brave’s; he’d set them on you and watch you go for as long as you took. But you could wave your arm off, he’d never look back and wave again. That was the limit his mind allowed.

  I almost forgot the row of tobacco. Then in early October I biked home for lunch and found a letter addressed in Mac’s hand, which was always more like printing than script. Mother was curious and stood close in as I opened the envelope. It held one sheet of lined tablet-paper with a penciled note, “Dear Ren, Here is what your tobacco brought. Be smart. Love, Mac.” The note was folded around a fifty-dollar bill. I’d never seen one before—neither had Mother—with its picture of Ulysses Grant, looking as sour as if he hadn’t won the War. Our household finances were nearer stability than they’d ever been; but fifty dollars was still a serious sum in 1943, the equivalent of maybe five hundred now. First we were speechless; then we must have danced. I know we were both so elated that I took the letter and the bill back to school and, with my teacher’s permission, showed it to the thunderstruck class (those were days when you didn’t fear an after-school mugging).

  I’ve long since forgot my purchases. I was already an obsessive collector of totemic objects—palpable things, mostly hand-size, that hummed for me with mysterious energy: a statuette of Superman, my own copy of a favorite library book (Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb), a set of flint arrowheads from a mail-order company in Montana, the stamps I collected, the model airplanes I made, a bronze coin of the Emperor Hadrian. I sent Mac more than one short letter, notifying him of major acquisitions, explaining their relevance to my education and thanking him again. His replies came promptly on penny postcards, seldom more than two sentences—he was glad to hear my news, he hoped to see me soon, be smart.

  It didn’t occur to me for some years that he was always secretive about his gifts. Whenever he gave me the ritual “Don’t tell Emma,” I’d nod and comply—accustomed, like any child, to family conspiracies. He’d told me to tell Ida and Elizabeth (he always said “your mammy”), so I rushed to tell and then was sorry. A child that young has too few secrets; I should have kept mine. I also never wondered why Emma might have minded. In her good months Miss Emma seemed as generous as Mac, with her time and intelligence. Like any busy child I filed such questions as insoluble adult mysteries and went downtown to open my first checking account at the First National Bank. The manager was a friend of Will’s and came to the teller’s window to thank me—“Reynolds, I bet you’re our youngest depositor. Welcome to the family.” And with Mac’s continued help, I never looked back in my life as a junior financier.

  From then on, Mac cut an even larger figure in my mind. He was not just the cousin who gave me outings from Ida’s house and exposed me to the useful mysteries of farming, tenant-owner relations, the horrific skills of hog killing and butchering, saddling and riding a horse and the deep satisfactions of generosity. He was the only friend, except my parents, who confirmed his love for me with tangible gifts on any occasion but Christmas and my birthday. He was the one reliable financial benefactor of my childhood. Various aunts and cousins would strike unexpectedly with birthday checks or the odd dollar-bill; but Mac not only endowed me each fall, and in the most enjoyable way (secretly), he also responded to every interim hint. And since he never asked for thanks or bargained for any return from me, the dignified silence of his giving taught me volumes about the difficulties and duties of receiving. Simone Weil states the dilemma precisely, “Our friends owe us what we think they will give us. We must forgive them this debt.”

  Once Mac began his harvest gift—and as long as his tobacco thrived—he knew I expected the money and that I might even hope for occasional increases. And I knew that he knew that I knew. Will and Elizabeth’s only concern in the matter was that I thank Mac appropriately and that I write him from time to time. Neither of them, in their own childhood, had faced so early a training in gratitude, so I was on my own to steer a true course. By the time of the second y
ear’s harvest, I’d begun to see at least some of the ways in which generosity can be, not a burden but a real enhancement of mutual care. Mac seemed all the grander, less old and secret, much funnier and all the more trustworthy as a friend. In his eyes I hope I seemed to get smarter, though Mother had warned me not to show off or to correct my elders unless they were doing something actively dangerous.

  RICHARD WRIGHT (1908-1960)

  Born on a cotton plantation near Natchez, Mississippi, the son of a sharecropper and a teacher, Richard Wright ended his formal schooling at sixteen.

  At seventeen, Wright moved to Memphis, where, using forged notes to borrow books, he read most of everything the public library contained. When he was nineteen he migrated to Chicago, where he wrote poems; ten years later, he moved to New York. Switching to prose, he wrote his first four books. The novel Native Son (1940) and the autobiography Black Boy (1945) made him prominent. He was the first black novelist to write about life and rage in the northern cities.

  Following an invitation from the government of France, he moved to Paris, where he and his family could live without fear of prejudice; there he stayed. He published eleven books during his short life. Native Son and The Outsider (1953) remain his best-known novels.

  Wright’s memoir Black Boy consists of a series of dramatic encounters with the closed society in the white South of the time. American Hunger, the complete text of the original second section of Black Boy, did not see publication until seventeen years after Wright died. “My environment,” Wright said of his boyhood world, “contained nothing more alien than writing.” This selection from Black Boy describes Wright’s literary adolescence.