Modern American Memoirs

by Annie Dillard

  We shook hands and I gave her one of my bracelets. After that everything went well for me. Big Sweet helped me to collect material in a big way. She had no idea what I wanted with it, but if I wanted it, she meant to see to it that I got it. She pointed out people who knew songs and stories. She wouldn’t stand for balkiness on their part. We held two lying contests, story-telling contests to you, and Big Sweet passed on who rated the prizes. In that way, there was no argument about it.

  So when the word came to Big Sweet that Lucy was threatening me, she put her foot up on Lucy in a most particular manner and warned her against the try. I suggested buying a knife for defense, but she said I would certainly be killed that way.

  “You don’t know how to handle no knife. You ain’t got dat kind of a sense. You wouldn’t even know how to hold it to de best advantage. You would draw your arm way back to stop her, and whilst you was doing all dat, Lucy would run in under your arm and be done; cut you to death before you could touch her. And then again, when you sure ’nough fighting, it ain’t enough to just stick ’em wid your knife. You got to ram it in de hilt, then you pull down. They ain’t no more trouble after dat. They’s dead. But don’t you bother ’bout no fighting. You ain’t like me. You don’t even sleep with no mens. I wanted to be a virgin one time, but I couldn’t keep it up. I needed the money too bad. But I think it’s nice for you to be like that. You just keep on writing down them lies. I’ll take care of all de fighting. Dat’ll make it more better, since we done made friends.”

  She warned me that Lucy might try to “steal” me. That is, ambush me, or otherwise attack me without warning. So I was careful. I went nowhere on foot without Big Sweet.

  Several weeks went by, then I ventured to the jook alone. Big Sweet let it be known that she was not going. But later she came in and went over to the cooncan game in the corner. Thinking I was alone, Lucy waited until things were in full swing and then came in with the very man to whom Big Sweet had given the “reading.” There was only one door. I was far from it. I saw no escape for me when Lucy strode in, knife in hand. I saw sudden death very near that moment. I was paralyzed with fear. Big Sweet was in a crowd over in the corner, and did not see Lucy come in. But the sudden quiet of the place made her look around as Lucy charged. My friend was large and portly, but extremely light on her feet. She sprang like a lioness and I think the very surprise of Big Sweet being there when Lucy thought she was over at another party at the Pine Mill unnerved Lucy. She stopped abruptly as Big Sweet charged. The next moment, it was too late for Lucy to start again. The man who came in with Lucy tried to help her out, but two other men joined Big Sweet in the battle. It took on amazingly. It seemed that anybody who had any fighting to do, decided to settle-up then and there. Switch-blades, ice-picks and old-fashioned razors were out. One or two razors had already been bent back and thrown across the room, but our fight was the main attraction. Big Sweet yelled to me to run. I really ran, too. I ran out of the place, ran to my room, threw my things in the car and left the place. When the sun came up I was a hundred miles up the road, headed for New Orleans.

  MARGARET MEAD (1901-1978)

  Physicians told anthropologist Margaret Mead she was infertile. When she was thirty-eight, however, Mead and her third husband, Gregory Bateson, had a child, Mary Catherine. After a suitable interval, Mary Catherine Bateson had a child, and Mead became a grandmother. By then she had written ten major works of anthropology and ethnography, starting with her 1928 Coming of Age in Samoa. She had written about tribes in New Guinea, Bali, and Nebraska. She taught at Columbia, worked in an office in New York’s American Museum of Natural History, and so liked a public forum that for seventeen years she wrote a column for Redbook.

  This is from her 1972 memoir, Blackberry Winter. Mary Catherine Bateson’s memoir of her parents is With a Daughter’s Eye.

  from BLACKBERRY WINTER

  And so it came about that at thirty-eight, after many years of experience as a student of child development and of childbirth in remote villages—watching children born on a steep wet hillside, in the “evil place” reserved for pigs and defecation, or while old women threw stones at the inquisitive children who came to stare at the parturient woman—I was to share in the wartime experience of young wives all around the world. My husband had gone away to take his wartime place, and there was no way of knowing whether I would ever see him again. We had a little money, a recent bequest from Gregory’s aunt Margaret, so I would not have to work until after the baby was born. But that was all. Initially, we had thought that I might join Gregory in England, but my mother-in-law wrote that they were sending away busloads of pregnant women. Obviously it was better to stay in America than to become a burden in Britain as the country girded itself for war….

  During these months I had all the familiar apprehensions about what the baby would be like. There was some deafness in my family, and there had been a child who suffered from Mongolism and a child with some severe form of cerebral palsy. There also were members of my family whom I did not find attractive or endearing, and I knew that my child might take after them. Distinguished forebears were no guarantee of normality. But what I dreaded most, I think, was dullness. However, I could do something about anxieties of this kind by disciplining myself not to expect the child to be any special kind of person—of my own devising. I felt deeply—as I still feel—that this is the most important point about bringing into the world a child that will have its own unique and clear identity.

  So I schooled myself not to hope for a boy or a girl, but to keep an open mind. I schooled myself to have no image of what the child would look like and no expectations about the gifts he or she might, or might not, have. This was congenial to me, for I had already learned to watch carefully the power that my imagination could have over the thoughts and dreams of other people. People would come to me with some vague stirring of ambition, some vague glimpse of a possible future, and unless I was careful, I would find myself imagining a whole future and the course of action necessary to grasp it. As students or friends talked about what they wanted to be or do, a panorama would unfold before my eyes in which I could see how some special combination of talent and experience might make possible a unique contribution to the world. It was better, I had learned, to listen and occasionally suggest some alternatives or some of the complications of the course chosen by the other person. In the same way, I determined not to limit the child that was to be born—not to hope for it to be beautiful or intellectually gifted or temperamentally happy.

  There was another problem, too, of which I was quite aware. I had been a “baby carriage peeker,” as Dr. David Levy described the child with an absorbing interest in babies, and he identified this as one of the traits that predisposed one to become an overprotective mother. When I told him, in a telephone conversation, that I was expecting a baby, he asked, in that marvelous therapeutic voice which he could project even over the telephone, “Are you going to be an overprotective mother?” I answered, “I’m going to try not to be.” But I realized that whatever predisposition in this direction I might have must have been reinforced by hope that was so often disappointed, and I knew that I would have to work hard not to overprotect my child, but to ensure my child’s freedom to find its own way of taking hold of life and becoming a person….

  Mary Catherine Bateson was born on December 8, 1939, and looked very much herself….

  We called her Cathy. She was fair-haired, her head was unmarred by a hard birth or the use of instruments, and her expression was already her own. I was completely happy.

  As she was born on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, it pleased the sisters at French Hospital that she was also named Mary. But she has never been called by this name. More recently, as she has grown older, she has wanted to be called Catherine. Try as I do to call people by whatever name they wish, I find this difficult. Perhaps it is because I have lived so long among peoples for whom names were too vital a part of the personality to be treated light
ly, among whom true names were not pronounced. For me the name Catherine carries a heavy weight, compounded as it is not only of all the Katherines who preceded my daughter but of her complete self as well. Here we have compromised. I speak of her as Cathy when I refer to her as a child, but when I talk about her older years, she is Catherine.

  My friend Margaret Fries, who did pioneering work on the propensities of the newborn, came to the hospital to give Cathy her tests and found her to be well on the quiet side. Although she did not fall asleep, as some newborn babies do when they are frustrated, she did not fight for the nipple when it was taken away from her. Margaret Fries’ counsel was that she was just quiet enough so that it would be unwise to subject her to much frustration. Some babies can adapt to life only by occasional hard crying, but we saw to it that Cathy had as little occasion as possible to cry.

  Inevitably her arrival was accompanied by a good deal of excitement. I had so many friends, and so many of them came from circles in which children were a major preoccupation—educators, child analysts, and child psychologists. They all shared my delight in having a child. And so did my childless friends—Jane Belo, who had been so close to us in Bali and who had been with us in Kintamani when I lost a baby there, and Marie Eichelberger, who took Cathy as her special charge and became “Aunt Marie” forever. In England, Nora Barlow began to plan all over again for a Darwin-Bateson marriage as she visualized Cathy as a prospective bride for her grandson Jeremy, who was born four months earlier.

  Cathy’s paternal grandmother wrote that the baby’s hands were like her own father’s hands. He had been a surgeon at Guy’s Hospital in London and it was fabled that when his students watched him operate they were hypnotized by the beauty of his hands. My mother-in-law added that “Margaret has nice hands, too, though small.” This gave me a twinge of surprise, for I had always thought that small hands were embellishment in a woman, not to be dismissed with a “though.” All the Batesons and Durhams were tall, and I had a momentary worry—that did recur from time to time—that Cathy might have my features, which are better in a small face, but that she might grow like a bean pole to match her paternal inheritance.

  One of the most fascinating preoccupations when one has a child of one’s own is watching for the appearance of hereditary traits and predispositions that can be attributed to—or blamed upon—one side of the family or the other. Like everything else about biological parenthood, it is a mixed blessing. The traits in which one takes pride and the traits of the other parent whom one loves are doubly endearing in the shared child. The child who is born with such a combination, as I was, starts off in life with a special blessing. But the child who displays repudiated parental traits starts life with a handicap. The parents have to make an extra effort not to respond negatively to those traits in their child which they dislike or fear in themselves.

  Cathy inherited a felicitous combination of family traits. Her eyes were blue, bluer than her father’s or mine, and her hair, blond that changed to light brown, was indistinguishable from ours. Her long fingers are her father’s. When she is still, she uses her hands as her father does, with the fingers arranged asymmetrically; when she moves and talks, she uses her hands symmetrically, as I do. There is one photographic sequence, made when she was about three, in which she shifts back and forth in just this way, a dozen times on one reel of film.

  Bringing up Cathy was an intellectual as well as an emotionally exciting adventure. I believed that the early days of infancy were very important—that it made a difference how a child was born, whether it was kept close to its mother, whether it was breast-fed, and how the breast feeding was carried out. I also realized that when we began to regulate child feeding by the clock and a measured formula in a bottle, this was done with the best intentions. For if babies were to be fed cow’s milk, milk that came in unlimited quantities from a dairy—and bottle feeding was initially an urban phenomenon—then a system had to be devised that somehow approximated the delicate self-regulating system that develops between a breastfeeding mother and her breast-fed baby. And if more babies were to be protected from weakening and dying because their mothers’ milk was not adequate or because a particular child could not be well nourished by its own mother, then some babies—perhaps a majority—might have to be bottle-fed. But in 1939 I only vaguely understood these things.

  At that time it was believed that the crucial thing for a child’s survival and well-being was the mother’s acceptance of her baby and her acceptance of breast feeding. Only later we heard about the rejecting baby—the baby that could not adapt to its mother. Still later we heard about the failed nursing couple—the mother and infant who, although they did not reject each other, were physiologically unadapted to each other.

  I was trying to invent something new—to adapt breast feeding to modern living conditions and to use a clock in a situation in which the mother who constantly carried her baby under her breast or in a net bag on her back had no need of a clock. And I introduced the idea of taking notes on the progress of the breast feeding, so that I would know—and not retrospectively falsify, as it is so easy to do—what actually happened. My mother had expressed her love for me by taking voluminous notes on my development. And I myself had been watching and recording the behavior of children for many years. For me note-taking was, as it is, part of life.

  From the moment we left the hospital and escaped from the hospital rhythm, I struggled to establish breast feeding in response to Cathy’s expressed need. Until then I could not know how much she cried and I could not have distinguished her spontaneous cry from the crying of all the babies segregated in the hospital nursery, where they suffered all the disadvantages—and lacked the advantage of having a mother nearby—of creatures born in a litter, kittens or puppies.

  As so many war wives were to do, I took my newborn baby home to my father’s house in Philadelphia. As there had been no baby there for thirty years, Mother had forgotten almost all the lore she had ever known. But she did remember that little babies cried because they were bored, and she recommended that we prop Cathy up on pillows so she could see the world….

  She learned to talk very early and began to use the intensive mode, which makes it very easy to transpose sentences. For example, when someone would ask her, “Did you sit on a rock in Central Park?” she would answer, “Yes, I did sit on a rock in Central Park.” This gave an impression of enormous comprehension, and as a result, people talked with her using more and more difficult constructions. Her warm responsiveness, her trustingness, and her outgoing interest in people and things all evoked lively responses from others and set the stage for her expectation that the world was a friendly place.

  When she was eighteen months old, we were asked to plan a film that dealt with the problem of childhood trust. This brought us up against the problem that bedevils all the news media—how to represent adequately something that is good. Fear and rage are easy to photograph, but trust is not. Finally we settled for pictures of Cathy, wearing a baby harness, hurling herself over the edge of a steep decline, completely secure in the knowledge that her father was firmly holding on to the leash. This film was never made.

  Later, when she was almost three, a plan was made for a film of a child being given a routine physical examination. This was to be shown to working mothers who were shy of letting their children go to day-care centers. Cathy was chosen to portray the child because she was so unfrightened and so accustomed to photography. But no one considered the response of the pediatrician. The film turned into a sequence in which Cathy, smiling and nude, put the pediatrician, who was shaking with stage fright, at his ease. But the film was never used.

  How much was temperament? How much was felicitous accident? How much could be attributed to upbringing? We may never know. Certainly all a mother and father can claim credit for is that they have not marred a child in any recognizable way. For the total adult-child situation could be fully understood only if one also had the child’s own interpretation o
f the parts that adults played in its life.

  In the winter our household consisted of Nanny, her daughter Audrey, Cathy, Gregory, and myself. But in summer we went to Holderness, New Hampshire, and lived near the Franks. There we were joined by two English children, Philomena and Claudia Guillebaud, whom we had brought over at the time of Dunkirk and who lived with my parents during the winter….

  In the summer months I had an opportunity to realize what it had been like to bring up a child in a household in which there were many willing hands ready to hold the baby and someone to do the endless chores and to sleep with the baby at night, so that the mother’s contacts with her child were both intense and relaxed. In a sense it was all anachronistic and war-determined. Without the war we would have had only one adolescent, Audrey, instead of three. And, of course, having a nanny was a survival from an earlier day. Even before the war, nannies were disappearing in England; often the older ones stayed on to be the only servants in great houses that had been built to be cared for by a large staff of men and maid servants….

  As the years went by, I had carefully not let myself hope that I would have grandchildren, as I knew before Catherine had children I would be old enough to be a great-grandmother. Great-grandmotherhood is something we do not think of as a likely possibility of the human condition, even now when it is becoming more common.

  But I did think how delightful it would be, if it happened, to see my daughter with a child. And I wondered what kind of child Catherine and Barkev Kassarjian would have—she with her long ancestry from the British Isles and he with his long Armenian heritage in the Middle East, she with her English fairness and he with his dark eyes and black hair. Thinking back to my grandmother and my mother and the kind of mother I had tried to be and remembering all the different kinds of mothering people who had cared for my daughter in her childhood—her English nanny, her lovely young aunt Mary, and her devoted godmother, Aunt Marie, who brought in the generation of my grandmother’s day when people respected heirlooms and passed their dolls on from generation to generation—I wondered what kind of child my daughter would have and what kind of mother she would be….