Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  Alice, decades later, understanding that her mother’s enthusiasm for Nic had collapsed, asks what drew her parents together: In “Are You in Love?”—one of Adams’s Chapel Hill stories in which Jessica and Tom Todd stand in for Agatha and Nic—the narrator wonders if Jessica married Tom because he was “writing a book on Shelley.” Then the narrator adds: “(Not true: she married him because of passionate kisses—then.)” Agatha and Nic’s sojourn in Europe was a romantic and intellectual adventure. The couple kept a single diary, taking turns recording their days. Agatha’s lush descriptions—“I discover unearthly shade of emerald in crest of black waves”—alternate with Nic’s notes about people they’ve met—“a Jew, son of immigrants, brilliant, no manners.” They cross France by train, stopping without reservations to find one delightful hotel room after another. This joint diary, as well as concern for comfortable, quiet hotel rooms and good food, suggests a congenial marriage. In Madrid husband and wife enroll in classes at Universidad Central and live with “loathsome” (Nic writes) other boarders who have no manners but enjoy a busy routine of study, tennis, and plays. They do not keep house.

  Life in Spain was infectiously provocative for both Nic and Agatha. In Andalusia for Christmas, they attend an “oppressively limp and lifeless” (Agatha) English church, but offset that with a “wild mixture of the comic and the mystic” in a Spanish nativity play with wise men who bring girls to do a seductive dance before the Savior and offer Him a lottery ticket for good luck. They take tea in the Moorish courtyard of the famed Pasaje de Orient restaurant, where the “wealth and fashion of Seville stares at us as if we wore bathing suits.”

  One evening Agatha wrote, “Nic and I, alone for once, spend the morning happily in the beautiful Parque de Maria Luisa… a hospitable Andalusian turns on the fountain for us—a delicate jet of sparkling drops. How imaginative and poetic are Spanish parks.” Between the lines, Agatha seems to be longing for more time alone with her young husband.

  University classes finished, in spring Agatha and Nic depart on a bicycle and train trip through Italy and Switzerland and France. They stop in villages, such as Rolampont, where Nic was during the war, sometimes locating people he stayed with before. But others are dead, and Agatha writes, “One cannot feel in France that the war is over—soldiers everywhere—a nation armed to the teeth.” A French couple accommodates them in a low-ceilinged room with a feather bed “too narrow for one person—a somewhat restless night,” Agatha notes. “Inevitable scorching plum brandy” is “forced down [their] throats,” accompanied by “talk about its remarkable purity and quality, it being made at home.” Happily, there is one exception: “a magical yellow liqueur made of quince.” Near Reims they visit the farm where Nic slept under an apple tree during a night of shelling. Everywhere they encounter “trees split and tortured by shells, a grey bleakness… Drab blighted forests ruined by the stupidity of fighting.” Nic no longer writes in the little quadrille-lined notebooks with black covers. It has become Agatha’s work to keep this bleak record. Perhaps the bleakness began to seep into their marriage.

  While Nic and Agatha were at Columbia and in Europe, Agatha’s next younger brother, Beverley Munford Boyd, served in the Army Air Corps and became an Episcopal priest, fulfilling the dream that had eluded their father. Ambition ran deep in Agatha’s family. Her youngest brother, blind Munny, became a lawyer with help from their mother, who read his casebooks to him. Nic’s parents kept their bookstore in Fredericksburg and sustained a secondary household made up, reportedly, of their two mothers and five maiden aunts.14

  Passing over opportunities to live near relatives after their wander year, Agatha and Nic returned to the place where they’d met, Lynchburg High School in Virginia, and resumed teaching. In 1924, the University of North Carolina, in the town of Chapel Hill, offered Nic a position as assistant professor in the Department of Romance Languages.

  * * *

  Nic and Agatha arrived in North Carolina during a time of cultural renovation and excitement. H. L. Mencken, in his famous 1917 screed “Sahara of the Bozart,” had called the American South a “stupendous region of worn-out farms, shoddy cities and paralyzed cerebrums… as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert.” Mencken regretted the destruction of the gentry whose “civilization of manifold excellences” thrived in old Virginia before the Civil War. That war “left the land to the harsh mercies of the poor white trash, now its masters,” as cultured Southerners moved north, leaving behind “a vast plain of mediocrity, stupidity, lethargy, almost dead silence.” The remnants of the old aristocracy, Mencken argued, needed to reestablish their influence; thus he initiated a Southern literary renaissance and prompted Southern writers to explore their identity.

  From earliest colonial days, North Carolina, settled by small farmers and never a large slaveholding state, languished economically between Virginia and South Carolina—“a vale of humility between two mountains of conceit,” as a popular epithet has it. Chapel Hill in 1924 was a village of about two thousand people with many unpaved streets at the eastern edge of the state’s Piedmont region, which had, Agatha wrote, “no spectacular beauty, but a subdued loveliness which grows with familiarity.”15 The town’s heart and reason for being was the University of North Carolina, considered the oldest public university in the United States (1789), whose salmon-pink brick buildings didn’t yet fill its five hundred acres on a low granite hill. A block of shops on Franklin Street, a few dozen fine houses, and the Episcopal and Baptist churches flanked the college.

  In returning to the South—and perhaps especially to North Carolina—Nic and Agatha were taking on the challenge of reviving Southern culture. The university offered almost tuition-free admission to any white boy who had graduated from high school in North Carolina and was “crowded with country youth whose parents were unbelievably proud of them for being in college.” One of those youths, Thomas Wolfe, had recently departed Chapel Hill and gone to Harvard to study playwriting, which he would later abandon to write Look Homeward, Angel, part of which reprises his days as a UNC undergrad. Another Tar Heel State native, playwright Paul Green, upon whose biography Alice Adams drew for a character in her Southern novels, had just built himself a new house southeast of town. That house became a gathering place for those who wanted to write or talk about books, including Green’s wife, Elizabeth; his brother-in-law, biographer Phillips Russell; and such visitors as poet Allen Tate and novelist Caroline Gordon.

  When Nic and Agatha Adams moved to Chapel Hill, the village was becoming the “bookish” town that Alice Adams described when interviewers asked her about her youth there: “Being a writer was the best possible thing. Writers were our folk heroes. So I was always serious about being a writer, or to put it negatively, nothing else occurred to me to be.”16 At UNC Agatha completed the master’s degree she had begun at Columbia with a thesis on a legendary Romantic character in the nineteenth-century Spanish drama El pastelero de Madrigal.17 With a degree in her husband’s chosen field, Agatha had to face the fact that the university had not a single female faculty member. She wanted to teach, but she later told her fellow Randolph-Macon alumnae, “My lot was thrown in with the University of North Carolina [which] has been for one hundred and fifty years a man’s university, has admitted women students lately and grudgingly, and still regards women faculty members as somewhat irritating phenomena.… It is part of the folklore of the state that young North Carolina males are so robustious, so incredibly rambunctious, that no mere woman could possibly keep their attention on the niceties of English prose composition.”18

  While UNC squelched Agatha’s ambition to be a teacher, she continued to collaborate with Nic on his projects, including a coauthored guide to Spanish literature in English translation. Soon motherhood and domestic responsibilities absorbed more of her time. It was difficult to find rental housing in Chapel Hill and too costly to purchase a house in town. Instead she and Nic bought adjoining parcels of land (.85 acre altoget
her) including an old farmhouse, barn, and stable, a mile south of town on the road that led to Pittsboro. Alice wrote later,

  [Nic and Agatha] must have been drawn to all that space, a couple of acres; they may have already been planning the gardens, the tennis court and the grape arbors they were to put in later. And they must have fallen in love with the most beautiful view of farther gentle hills and fields, and a border of creek. They would have placed these aesthetic advantages above the convenience of a smaller lot, a tidier house in town. And along with the space and the view, they chose an unfashionable direction (which would have been characteristic; my parents—especially my mother, a snobbish Virginian—were always above such considerations).

  Because the Southern rural economy had collapsed at the end of World War I, the Adamses acquired their little acre for a total of $200. The arrival of Alice prompted Nic and Agatha to add a wing: an upstairs master bedroom with a living room below. Additions that continued over the years gave the house “some strangeness… some awkwardness as to proportion and transition from one room to another. Upstairs, there was even a dead-end hall.”19

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Family Romance

  — 1926–1931 —

  I do remember a not-quite conscious feeling that my parents were too far away from where I slept; that they were also far from each other did not strike me as strange until some time later.

  —Alice Adams, “My First and Only House,” Return Trips

  In the fall of 1926, after Alice’s birth and Agatha’s long convalescence in Fredericksburg, baby Alice and her parents returned to the farmhouse in Chapel Hill. Verlie Jones, a black woman about Agatha’s age, came to work for the family and stayed for twenty-four years, an ever-present maternal figure for Alice. Mrs. Jones—always Verlie to her employers—walked two miles up old state highway 75 to the Adamses’ house from the dirt-floored shack with leaning walls where she lived with her husband, Horace; three daughters; and a son named Bontue Jones. Almost every day she arrived in time to make breakfast for the Adams family and stayed until she’d finished preparing dinner. Verlie appears repeatedly in Adams’s fiction, most memorably in her 1974 story called “Verlie I Say Unto You,” which takes its title from Verlie’s reply to Mr. Todd’s question about her name:

  “You know, it’s like in the Bible. Verlie I say unto you.”

  Tom felt that he successfully concealed his amusement at that, and later it makes a marvelous story, especially in academic circles, in those days when funny-maid stories are standard social fare. In fact people (white people) are somewhat competitive as to who has heard or known the most comical colored person, comical meaning outrageously childishly ignorant.1

  As US Census reports show, Verlie (short for Beverly) was a common name in North Carolina early in the twentieth century. Maybe the Adams family didn’t know that, or maybe Verlie was quietly making fun of her employer as he was of her. In another story by Adams, a North Carolina girl explains bitterly to a visitor from Cambridge: “I think Southerners are afraid if the talk gets abstract they’ll end up on the Negro problem, and as close as they can get to that is these boring stories about funny maids or complaining about the help situation.”2

  Indeed, racial segregation and an assumption of white supremacy reigned in virtually every aspect of social and economic life in pre-civil-rights-era North Carolina, from housing to schools and hospitals and movie theaters; very few blacks were allowed to vote, and none were enrolled at the University of North Carolina. In 1925, fiery speakers for and against the active, contemporary Ku Klux Klan filled Memorial Hall on campus.3 Not much later the Tar Heel published a photo of five “darkies” who had served Carolina students for periods ranging from 15 to 50 years as janitors after these “old boys” (aged thirty-nine to seventy-three) led a cheer at a football game.4

  One of many episodes revealing the racial attitudes that surrounded Alice as she grew up during the Jim Crow era unfolded when novelist Richard Wright came to Chapel Hill in 1940 to collaborate with playwright Paul Green on a play based on Wright’s novel Native Son. Wright could not stay at the university-owned Carolina Inn or dine in any restaurant in Chapel Hill, so Green found him a room and board in the black neighborhood between the university town and the white, working-class town of Carrboro. It was, in fact, the neighborhood where Verlie Jones then lived with some of her children. University president Frank Porter Graham (a liberal who’d been chided for hosting James Weldon Johnson and Zora Neale Hurston in Chapel Hill and would later be accused of communist affiliations by HUAC) granted Green a room in Bynum Hall where he and his Negro guest could work. It was summer, so Graham hoped no one would notice the collegial relations of Wright and Green. That was not to be. As Wright’s biographer Hazel Rowley reports: “Curious faces would look in at the window. Never had the South seen such a sight. A white man and a black man were sitting across from each other at a long table.”

  The collaboration resulted in a successful Broadway play directed by Orson Welles, even though, as Green later regretted, he addressed Wright as “Dick” while the younger man called him “Mr. Green.” For all his good intentions, Green was typical of the sort of Southern liberal Alice would come to dislike. Like Alice’s parents, who knew him well, Green was “a Southern gentleman” prone to saying things like the following, which Rowley quotes with bitter irony: “We are just full of the drip of human tears.… The love between the Negro and the white is something wonderful to behold in the South.”

  But before Wright and Green finished their work in Chapel Hill, Ouida Campbell, who was Green’s secretary, invited both men to a party at her family’s home in Carrboro. The next day several men with pistols, upset by reports that a Negro had visited Campbell, threatened to run “that boy” Wright out of town. Green claimed he spent the night in a cotton patch next to Wright’s room in case the ruffians showed up. They didn’t, and Wright returned to New York by train.5

  According to the 1940 book North Carolina: The WPA Guide to the Old North State, about 30 percent of the state’s population were Negroes, but the “average white person never ha[d] any dealings with Negro professors, lawyers, doctors, insurance men, merchants, or restaurant operators, though he ha[d] many contacts with Negro laborers.” Certainly Verlie Jones was an essential presence in the Adams household during Alice’s girlhood. Critical of the ironic distance with which her intellectually liberal parents protected themselves from thinking about race in segregated North Carolina, Adams confronted the subject repeatedly throughout her long writing career.

  Adams began writing with about black characters in her unpublished early stories. In one of these, a girl named Maude is warned not to drink water from Green Creek by her family’s maid, Odessa: “White ladies call it nigger water, say their children get black if they drink it…” Maude, whose own mother is unhappy and disagreeable, would rather be black and have Odessa for her mother. Soon after Odessa sends word that she is stricken with “misery in the leg,” Maude runs away to the creek, drinks the water, and waits for her skin to change. She tries to find Odessa. Sent home again, Maude is lovingly greeted by her father but feels lost: “She would sit here for the rest of her life, and nothing would be any different.”6

  The reality of Verlie’s situation was stark. The 1940 census reports that Verlie worked forty-five hours a week, fifty-two weeks a year, and earned $520 a year (equivalent to about $9,000 in 2019).I With what seems to be flawed memory, “Verlie I Say Unto You” reports that Verlie is paid “more money than most maids, thirteen dollars a week (most get along on ten or eleven). And she gets to go home before dinner, around six (she first leaves the meal all fixed for them)” because Mr. Todd “likes to have a lot of drinks and then eat late.” Verlie also got one Sunday a month off so she could go to church.

  * * *

  Nic Adams’s career at the university advanced rapidly, in tandem with the university’s improving national reputation during the post–World War I years. Named associate profe
ssor in 1927, Nic left Agatha and Alice home in the summer of 1929 while he traveled to Spain to research Spanish folktales and Spanish literature for American publishers.7 Contemporary Spanish Literature in English Translation, coauthored with Agatha, also appeared in 1929, as did an edition of Don Juan Tenorio by José Zorrilla that was closely related to the topic of Agatha’s master’s thesis. Shortly after Borzoi Knopf published the Zorrilla book, Nic was invited to lunch at the Carolina Inn by Blanche Knopf and then entertained both Blanche and Alfred Knopf, who was a wine connoisseur, at home, where Nic served him “the worst sort of raw corn liquor imaginable” (it was Prohibition).8

  In 1930, Nic celebrated his promotion to full professor by damming the creek to make a swimming pool in the ravine north of their house. The big, deep hole roughly cemented over figured largely in the Adamses’ expanding social life and in their daughter’s imagination. In his thirties, slender, vibrant Nic Adams cultivated the jazz-age look of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Likewise, he and Agatha were part of a circle of literature professors who partied together often with bootleg liquor in little kegs from nearby Fearrington Farm, meat grilled on a poolside pit, and other drinks and food (much of it prepared by Verlie) carried down the stone steps from the house.

  Soon after Nic was promoted, the already almost-bankrupt state of North Carolina was hit by further revenue reductions due to the Great Depression. Faculty salaries were cut by 10 percent, but being part of the university community buffered the Adams family from the worst effects of the Depression. Nonetheless, times were bad enough that Nic Adams’s younger colleague and friend Thomas J. Wilson abandoned teaching in the French Department to become an editor at Henry Holt & Co. in New York City. Soon the two men were corresponding about textbook projects, including Nic’s long-gestating The Heritage of Spain.9 Nic’s letters to Wilson during the winter of 1930–31 mention illnesses as often as they mention salary cuts and books.