The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

by Madeleine L'engle

  The name, the unpronounceable name of L’Engle, was originally de l’Angle, which is considerably easier. One spring when we were driving through château country, Mother told me that Dearma had gone looking for the de l’Angle château, and found it. Dearma stood outside the rusty wrought-iron gates and looked across the overgrown gardens to the château. An old woman in black was cutting roses, and hobbled up to the gates to ask Dearma if she could help her. “Mama told her who she was and why she had come, and the old woman said, ‘Oh, you’re one of the American cousins,’ and asked her in to tea.”

  “But how did the name get from de l’Angle to L’Engle?”

  “The story goes that during the rough years of the Reformation, two de l’Angle brothers quarreled over their religious convictions. The French Huguenot brother not only fled France to save his life, he was so angry with his brother that he changed his name.” L’Engle: my Southern kin pronounce it Langul; my Northern kin pronounce it Longle. I find it simplest to say it the way it looks: Lengel.

  I asked Mother, “When he changed his name, where did he go?”

  “He fled with his family to Santo Domingo, and became a planter. But the pattern of building a home and a way of life and then having to leave everything and flee is constant in our family. There was a bloody and violent uprising, and once again he had to take his wife and children and flee for his life. He set sail for the United States, and outside Charleston his ship was caught in a violent storm and wrecked. Only two lives were saved, two of the L’Engle children, a boy and a girl.”

  The two orphans were taken into the household of Judge William Johnson, and brought up with his children. Both, I think, married Johnsons, but here my genealogy is confused. Greatie’s husband, John L’Engle, was an adopted son of William Johnson’s. Mado is the one who is a direct descendant of the old judge; he was her grandfather; her mother was Anna Hayes Johnson; so she and William were cousins, but not by blood. Mother knew how it all worked out, and I should have written it down long ago, but somehow it never occurred to me that there might be a time like this, when she cannot tell me.

  I’m proud of that distant ancestor, William Johnson; he was Jefferson’s first appointee to the Supreme Court, the youngest justice to sit on the bench, and the first dissenting justice. Like most of my family, he was opinionated, articulate, and cared passionately about justice. While I was writing a novel set in the Deep South, The Other Side of the Sun, I had to do a good bit of research; my English school taught me more about the Wars of the Roses than about the American Revolution. I was delighted to come across William Johnson’s name as a man who stood up for the rights of the black man, both slave and free.

  After a slave uprising in Charleston, many restrictions were put on all Negroes, and a law was passed that no slave might be taught to read or write. Judge Johnson was infuriated at this gross injustice, and announced to the Supreme Court that he considered it unconstitutional.

  It is a present responsibility to be his descendant. He has left his mark on my genetic pattern, whether I like it or not. Because he came to me, not as a personage out of history, but as a living character in Mother’s stories, he has also left his mark on my memory, and so has given me the strength on occasion to speak out and take unpopular stands.

  Mother’s most treasured possession is a huge portrait of Judge Johnson’s grandchildren, my great-great-grandmother and my great-great-great-aunt, one playing the flute, the other the harp; the harp was one of the losses of the war. The portrait was painted by S. F. B. Morse, the man who invented Morse code but who was first known as a portrait painter. The two young women it portrays are part of me, as are the old judge, Greatie, Mado. Without them I would be someone else; I would not be me. My forebears have bequeathed to me the basic structure of my own particular pattern, both in my cells and in the underwater areas of my imagination.

  I look at Mother huddled in her chair by the window and think once more about Mado and Greatie. In a day of what we would consider primitive medical knowledge, and no nursing or convalescent homes, no hospitals as we understand hospitals today, they both lived to a ripe old age, with their wits about them. Up until Grandfather, there is no record of senility in the family, although there were a few “holy fools,” like the twins, Willy and Harry, in The Other Side of the Sun.

  Obviously, nursing homes have not caused senility in the elderly; but when grandmother or great-grandmother continued to live with the larger family, to be given meaning because she could at least stir the soup or rock the baby, the climate for growing old and dying was more healthy than it is today. I cannot reproduce that climate for Mother. Surgery kept her alive at eighty-seven; antibiotics pulled her through pneumonia at eighty-eight.

  For what? For this?

  But we cannot turn our backs on scientific progress. I did not want her operated on at eighty-seven until Pat assured me that the tumor in the caecum would cause her great discomfort unless it was removed. I could not tell the doctor not to give her antibiotics for pneumonia.

  All I can do is to try not to isolate her; is to hold her when she is afraid; is to accept her as she is, as part of this family, without whom we would be less complete.

  7

  The portraits in my mother’s family did not lead a static life, and it is a wonder that as many of them survived as did. During the war, when the Northern conquering troops took over and burned some of my forebears’ homes, the portraits—when there was time—were taken away and hidden, and some were never found again.

  Mother has hanging in her front hall a not very distinguished oil painting which has always fascinated me, because on the back is painted a crude chess or checkers board, which was used by the occupying soldiers. Many portraits and other paintings were wantonly slashed by sword or knife.

  So the family portraits mean a great deal to me, not as an aid to ancestor worship, but as beacons to guide me. I have many more portraits from Mother’s family than from Father’s, largely because Mother was the eldest of four, and the only girl, and Father was the youngest of ten, and the only surviving male. I have a pastel drawing of Mado as an old woman, done by one of her grandsons, my Uncle Bion. Her face is gentle and tolerant and wise, but I know that behind the compassion in the eyes there is judgment; she did not tolerate dishonor or despair. My mother learned much from her. I will try to learn, too.

  Tell me a story. My granddaughters are already starting the familiar refrain: “Tell a story about when Gracchi was little.”

  Gracchi’s world is gone, as far gone as is my present mother from her ousia. As with all worlds, it was good, and it was evil. It had vision, and it was blind. It was rich, and incredibly poor. How can I tell my granddaughters about a world of which I have had no firsthand experience?

  If it is impossible for me, it is doubly difficult for my children and trebly for my grandchildren to conceive of a United States in which the entire population was less than that of three of our major cities today.

  Jacksonville, now a major city, is bursting at its seams; yet when Mother was a little girl, it was a small town where everybody knew each other, and almost everybody was kin. Family towns are something few people today have known. We’re used to living among strangers and near-strangers, with the biological family dispersed north, south, east, west. But when Mother was a little girl, she could walk across the street to Mado’s house; it was only a few blocks to Amma and Ampa’s.

  Shortly after Hugh and I were married we visited Mother, and when she took us to church with her it was definitely not only to go to church, but also to be looked over, and Hugh was appalled that more than half the congregation was kin. Not so today.

  Jacksonville, Mother said, was never a typical Southern town. Even before the war, many Northern families had come to Florida, most of them in search of health, but there was little mingling between North and South. After the war, the chasm was even greater.

  Mother was born in Amma and Ampa’s house, just a year after her parents’ mar
riage. There was at that time no such thing as a hospital or a trained nurse in Jacksonville, and when Dearma became very ill shortly after Mother’s birth, nursing her was not easy. In those days it was thought unhealthy to have kitchen or bathroom in the house; the kitchen was a separate building behind the house. Mado and friends and relatives did the nursing, and there were plenty of relatives.

  William L’Engle had been the second of twelve children, all educated by Greatie, and Mother’s childhood was spent near a great number of aunts and uncles and cousins. Because of the vast age spans, generations were mixed up—one twelve-year-old boy bragged about dandling his great-uncle on his knee.

  Mother wrote, “When I was a little girl, I loved Louisa May Alcott’s books: Little Women, Little Men, Eight Cousins. As I look back now I can see the similarity in my life and Eight Cousins.” There were always plenty of children to play with, aunts and uncles to run to for comfort. Life more or less revolved around St. John’s Church, and at the four corners of the church lived four great-uncles and their large, multigeneration families.

  Play was simple. The girls had large collections of paper dolls, with enormous wardrobes which they painted by hand, and swapped around. For money they used bent pins. Because life at home was often tense and oppressive, Mother spent a great deal of time playing in the homes of varied cousins. She wrote, “The Daniel family life centered around the big student lamp on the dining table. There the family congregated in the evenings, reading aloud, playing games, studying lessons. I spent many happy hours in that magic circle. It was a warm, loving, family life. Tiny Aunt Emmy, with her little black shawl around her shoulders, her hair parted in the middle and coiled in a big knot at the back of her head, could still play the guitar and sing the old songs of the War between the States and the period before.

  “Cold winter nights we cousins used to roast potatoes in a little brick oven out in the yard. No potatoes have ever tasted so good. In the evening after our early suppers, we played hare and hounds. The hare had a bag filled with tiny pieces of paper. After a good head start, the hare began to drop the pieces of paper, with the hounds behind him in hot pursuit, following the scent.”

  There were many picnics on the banks of the St. Johns River. The great river which François Philippe had so loved is tidal, and salty, and, said Mother, is “the only navigable river that flows in the same direction as the Nile.” The trees near their favorite picnic place had enormous wild grapevines hanging on them which made wonderful swings.

  Sometimes the cousins, sitting on the floor of a big dray pulled by a mule, would be driven out near Palermo to a sugar-cane plantation, for the sugar-boiling. “I can remember how the hot thick syrup would burn our fingers when we pulled the taffy. We usually pulled in couples. It was hard to get started with our great wad of red-hot syrup, but once we got it going, it was great fun to watch the candy in the making. We would get farther and farther away from each other, while the candy got whiter all the time. The experts could braid it, but we children were usually content with a long rope.”

  Another activity which qualified as play for the children was taking flowers to the cemetery. In those days of large families and high mortality, my mother and her cousins were well acquainted with death. A scarlet-fever epidemic wiped out four first cousins in one week; malaria weakened resistance; yellow fever was a constant threat. The children who had survived whooping cough and measles and the various lethal fevers went regularly to the cemetery with lilies and amaryllis and cape jessamine, and decorated the graves. “So,” Mother said, “I have never had any fear of cemeteries but find them a peaceful place.”

  When the children were a little older most of them had learned to play the piano or the guitar, the flute or the harp, and sang, and one of their games (which Mother and I used to play, too) was tapping out the rhythm of a song or the theme of a symphony, and seeing who could guess first what the melody was.

  Mother’s Papa had a fine library, through which she was free to browse, and he was also a superb storyteller to his children. By the time I came along, he had lost the ability or the desire to tell stories. But when Mother and her brothers were little, he told imaginative and fantastic tales every night, in front of the fire on chilly winter evenings, sitting on the steps at the foot of the ramp to the beach in summer. Mother, and later on, her brothers, would sit by him, leaning against his knee and keeping one eye on his cigar, because the stories lasted only as long as the cigar lasted.

  8

  She thought of herself as uneducated and almost illiterate, my mother, because delicate health kept her from completing school. When she was feeling unwell she spent days at a time at Ampa’s, curled up in a big leather chair in his library, where there was a set of historical novels by Miss Mulbach—Empress Josephine, Queen Hortense; and by Charlotte M. Yonge, The Dove in the Eagle’s Nest (one of my childhood favorites), The Heir of Redclyffe; and she devoured these and many other historical novels ravenously. Ampa also had bound sets of Harper’s and Scribner’s, in which Henry Esmond and The Virginian had come out in monthly installments. With her cousins she read aloud by the hour, around a table in the winter, under the trees by the river bank in the warm weather. This habit of reading aloud, or being read to, remained with Mother all her life. Not only did she read to me when I was little, but she and Father read to each other every night of their lives, Dumas, Dickens, Dostoevsky. This is the first summer she has not enjoyed having our friend Gillian read to her in her clear and pleasant English voice.

  Does Mother remember, somewhere deep inside her, any of these years of treasure? She is far better read than I am, the great-grandmother who thinks of herself as being ignorant.

  And an ugly duckling who never turned into a swan. Dearma was considered a beauty, and Mother far too often heard people say, “This is Lena’s little girl. Isn’t it a pity she doesn’t look like her mother?” Another remark she never forgot was, “I do hope Lena’s little girl hasn’t inherited Cousin Edwina’s blue lips.”

  I always thought that my mother was beautiful, but she went through life with the conviction that she was the ugly daughter of a Southern beauty.

  Perhaps ideals of beauty then were as different as everything else. Mother said, and she was right: “It just isn’t possible for you and the children to understand the social barriers which existed after the war. We were terribly poor, and we bitterly resented the people from the North with money, particularly the carpetbaggers who had made their money getting fat on our defeat. The old Southerners stuck together, and the people from the North and West, who had come after the war, founded their own social group. They could afford more luxuries. They had more freedom.”

  Freedom from hunger; freedom to buy new clothes in new fashions; freedom from the strict rules of courtesy which were all that was left of the pre-war way of life; and freedom from the rigid religious observances of the old Southerners. Mother never forgot that the Northerners went to theatre and to concerts during Lent, while she had to go to church every day. There was always morning prayer at home for the entire household. Sundays were spent largely at church, and the only game allowed the children was the Bible game, which they all loved, since it was highly competitive, and dealt with the more colorful stories. The Bible was well known by the children, and Mother laughed as she told us that it was their “dirty book.” They used to hide in the closet and read the passages the grownups had not read aloud during family prayer.

  Not all that they read was understood. One day in Sunday school Mother innocently asked the teacher (a cousin, of course) what a foreskin was, and could not understand why she was disgraced.

  She learned her numbers when she was very small, playing cribbage with Ampa and casino with Amma. Up until this summer she has been able to play cribbage and solitaire; last summer she played bridge, although her game was no longer sharp and swift. I’ve never been any good at cards, but both Hugh and Josephine noticed when her playing began to slip.

  Jacksonville whe
n Mother was a little girl had roads mostly of deep sand. Bay Street was paved with round cypress blocks, and a few streets had a kind of shredded palmetto, brown in color, which looked like moss. On some of the larger streets were crushed oyster shells. Even when I was a little girl there were still some shell streets, and the street in front of Dearma’s house was made of cypress blocks. That’s all changed, now. The swing vines are gone because the great trees they hung from are gone. The wild river banks are lined with houses. But it does not do to look back on that world with too much nostalgia. There was great bitterness and resentment. Mado was one of the few whose spirit was never warped.

  A large part of Mother’s childhood and young girlhood was spent at the beach. When Mado built the beach cottage there was no way to reach it except by boat, but in the 1890’s a narrow-gauge railroad was built from South Jacksonville to San Pablo. Mado’s cottage was built piecemeal, with rooms added on as extra grandchildren and a little money were acquired. Mother wrote, “We were in Mado’s little cottage at the beach at the time of the Charleston earthquake. I was three years old. Aunt Caro Hallowes was visiting us, and Papa was on one of the Clyde ships on his way home from a business trip in the North.

  “The earthquake was so terrible in Charleston that we even felt it at the beach. I was sleeping in a trundle bed, pulled out from under Mado’s bed. In her fright, Mama rushed in after me and I remember being picked up in her arms, and she ran with me down the causeway to the beach. It was the worst possible thing she could have done, but thank God there was no tidal wave. Papa said they felt the earthquake on the ship far out at sea. The earthquake wasn’t as bad in Savannah as it was in Charleston, but Papa said that when the ship put in at Savannah, people were camping out in the streets, afraid to stay in their houses.”

  The only road at the beach was the beach itself. The cottage fronted the ocean; from the back veranda one could see a sandy track which barely passed for a road, and then there was a long, wild view across the scrub to the marshes and an occasional oasis of royal palms.