WHAT I MISS MOST ABOUT THE LONGVIEW LOSERS is the camaraderie. Being pounded into the mud by hoods from across town on a weekly basis is a bonding experience like no other. Because of my early years alone in the orange crate, I have a great longing to belong, coupled with an inability to do so. Consequently, I will join almost any group, but only briefly.
To prove that I’m now one of the girls, I accept a bid from a sorority at my high school named the Queen Teens. Our nickname is the Q.T.s, pronounced “cuties.” Our archrivals, the Devilish Debs, sometimes call us the Cooties. They’re envious because, although we’re regarded as trashier than they, we throw better parties.
Each Q.T initiate is instructed to submit a bra and panties. These are returned dyed purple, the club color, with holes cut out for the nipples and the crotch. At the initiation slumber party, we new members model our lacerated lingerie for the old members. Many old members are Baptists who are going steady with the burly footballers with whom I used to butt helmets. But the erotic charge in the small ranch house during this twisted fashion show is palpable as the smoke from their mentholated Salems wreathes the old members’ bouffants.
Meanwhile, I’ve experienced a religious conversion. I’ve announced to my parents that I don’t believe in God. The truth is that I no longer believe in the Episcopal God. I’ve come to believe instead in my grandmother’s Baptist God because He provides hayrides for His youth groups. The Baptist Youth have been reared to regard anything fun as a sin, so they think sin is fun.
After a few quick verses of “This Little Light of Mine” for the benefit of the chaperones in the truck cab, each Baptist boy piles up a barricade of hay bales while his Baptist girlfriend hollows out a nest in the loose hay that pads the truck floor. As the truck creeps slowly along the country roads, driven by someone’s salacious dad, the Baptist Youth have been known to make a believer out of more than one lapsed Episcopalian.
I’ve also joined the marching band. In our town, the Friday-night high school football game is almost as important as church on Sunday. It’s certainly more entertaining. I play the clarinet. I’d have preferred the trumpet, but our family owns an ancestral clarinet, so everyone who wants to play something must play that. John played it before me, and Bill will play it after me.
I’d also have preferred to play sports rather than the clarinet. But when a group of us girls presented the school board with our plan for a basketball team, the head of the board informed us that competitive sports were injurious to the emotional health of young women. (She will be hospitalized for bipolar disorder several years later, despite never having played basketball.)
My new plan for escaping the family clarinet involves becoming a flag swinger. At halftime the drum major leads the band onto the football field, followed by the school mascots, an Indian brave and squaw, both dressed in feathered headdresses and fringed buckskins. Our squaw is Jewish. Her father owns the nicest clothing store in town. The band director insists she’s the only student who looks Indian enough for the role. (As an adult, this woman will move to Atlanta and become president of the Hadassah.) After the Indians come the majorettes in their white boots, short shorts, and uniform jackets, led by the head majorette, who twirls the fire baton once the bonfire is lit and the stadium lights are extinguished.
Behind the majorettes come the half dozen flag swingers, also clad in white boots, short shorts, and uniform jackets. Their maroon-and-gray flags (the school colors) are the size of bridge tablecloths. They’re attached to four-foot staffs with bulb handles. By grasping the bulb you can wave and swirl the flag in hypnotic patterns, making snapping sounds. This is done while marching with your knees brought so high that your thighs are parallel to the ground. It’s like rubbing your stomach and patting your head at the same time.
One of the flag swingers, although a Devilish Deb, is willing to break ranks and help me realize my dream. She teaches me the routines in my backyard. I march up and down the driveway practicing them for months. The toddlers from next door watch me with round eyes. The dogs try to shred my flapping flag. My family members snigger from the windows of the house.
The day for the tryouts arrives. My flag swinger pal tells me I’ve got it made: grades count in the final computations, and I’m second in my class. Although I perform my routine flawlessly before the band director and the gym teachers, when the list of winners is posted, my name isn’t on it.
As I turn to walk away, I realize why. My grades are high, and as I march my knees nearly touch my chin. But the flag swingers and majorettes are drop-dead gorgeous. I’m okay-looking in a wholesome, camp-counselor kind of way. But I’m not perky or frisky. I’m awkward and shy. Worst of all, I lack vim.
For the first time, I turn to the balm of writing, soon discovering that those prevented from living the life to which they aspire can write about it instead. I produce my first short story. I’ve been reading Faulkner novels from the town library, and I’m entranced by stream of consciousness. In the fourth-grade play, I was Miss Noun, who was married by the preacher to Mr. Verb. It is exhilarating to learn that a famous author writes in phrases that sometimes divorce the two.
My story is told from the perspective of Nathan Hale on the morning of his hanging by the British for spying during the American Revolution. He watches through his prison bars as the boots of the approaching soldiers crush the autumn leaves, and he reflects on the brevity and futility of life. Through Nathan Hale I express my own despair at having failed in the flag-swinging competition, at facing another tedious football season playing the family clarinet in the fourth row of the marching band.
“Leaves falling. Rust and scarlet and gold. Boots tromping, smashing, crushing. In front of the courthouse, dangling above the scaffold in the red from the rising sun, a noose….”
The story is published in the school newspaper because I’m also the feature editor to whom I’ve submitted it. But when it appears, I don’t recognize it. It reads, “Brightly colored leaves were falling to the ground outside the bars across Nathan’s window. The soldiers marched through them on their way to the jail to escort him to the gallows….”
I race into the classroom of the faculty adviser, Mrs. Hawke, who’s my English teacher and the wife of a local sheriff. She’s tall and bony with a face that always looks pained. I say, “Mrs. Hawke, something awful has happened to my story!”
Looking up from her desk, she says, “I bet you think that story was pretty good?”
“I didn’t think it was so bad that it needed to be completely rewritten.”
“Well, let me tell you something, little lady: that story wasn’t even written in complete sentences.”
After a long pause, I say, “Mrs. Hawke, if you’re going to rewrite my story, you should put your name on it, not mine.”
“And if you’re going to speak to me in that tone of voice,” she replies, “you need to march right down to the office and see what our guidance counselor has to say about students who are rude to their teachers.”
She writes out a referral slip and hands it to me. I stomp to the office. The guidance counselor suggests that I go home for the rest of the day and contemplate the consequences of being disrespectful to my superiors.
*
When my mother hears of this, she drives us both to the school. She drags me into the principal’s office and insists I tell him what’s happened. Shaking his head, he rescinds my expulsion and sends me back to class.
But Mrs. Hawke and I are now archenemies. One of her test questions asks for the definition of perdition. I write “damnation,” and she counts it wrong because it’s not “hell.”
I race to the library and look up perdition in a dictionary. The definition given is “damnation.” I carry the dictionary to Mrs. Hawke’s classroom, lay it on her desk, and point this out.
She says, “Well, I bet every dictionary doesn’t define perdition this way.”
I reply that one is enough to make my case.
Gazing at me through narrowed eyes, she agrees to give me half credit. But it’s clear she has me marked out as a troublemaker.
In the summer of 1959, I work as a receptionist in my father’s office. I’m impressed by how much time he spends with his patients and how kind he is to them. But I’m most impressed by the fact that he charges them only $3 per visit. Some can’t afford even that, so they pay him with cakes or country hams or sacks of beans.
One evening as he’s driving me home, we pass a poor part of town. I make a snotty-teenager remark about the people who live there.
Very quietly he says, “Those people are my patients and my friends, and I never want to hear you talk that way again.”
Later that summer we take a family vacation to a South Carolina beach. When we pull into our driveway upon our return, Stanley from next door greets us wearing a suit, even though it’s not Sunday.
As I climb out, I ask Stanley, “Why are you all dressed up?”
“We’ve just been to Martha’s funeral,” he says, and explains that Martha, my best friend from childhood, has died in a wreck at church camp in a car driven by a youth minister who was showing off by racing around the mountain curves. His car veered off the road and rolled down a cliff. Martha, who was sitting by an open back window, was thrown partway out. The car landed on top of her.
I walk upstairs to my room and lie down on my bed. I’m completely numb, as though my arm has just been lopped off. (When I think of this, even forty-five years later, I’m still numb.)
Once we get our drivers’ licenses, my friends and I spend most of our lives in our parents’ cars, like gypsies in their pony carts. Marty and Jane are my most frequent companions because they live nearby. Marty’s father is a doctor and her mother is on the school board. She’s very well coordinated and, like me, would love to ruin her emotional health by playing organized sports. Instead, she’s dating the star of our basketball team. Jane, a popular cheerleader whose father is a businessman, is dating our quarterback.
My boyfriend, Harold, is a good baseball player, but he doesn’t have time for sports. He works almost full-time at Sobel’s, the clothing store owned by the father of Linda, our Dobyns-Bennet High School squaw. Harold is the best-dressed boy at our school. He reminds me of my grandfather — tall and slender with beautiful clothes and a diamond pinky ring.
Hour after hour, day after day, week after week, Jane, Marty, and I drive up Broad Street to the train station, U-turn, and descend Broad to the church circle. Teens arrive from all over southwest Virginia and East Tennessee to join us. At night, Broad Street is like a Los Angeles freeway during rush hour. Cars stop as passengers from one hop into another, or as people flirt or argue with those headed in the opposite direction.
Constantly picking up or dropping off any of a dozen other friends, we eat fries and burgers at drive-in restaurants. We go to drive-in movies. Our favorite prank is to move the car when one of us goes to the refreshment stand, so the abandoned one has to hunt through the rows of parked cars with their panting occupants to find us. Smoking Pall Malls, we cruise the new road to Bristol, the first divided highway in our area, with the same excitement as when we rode the new escalator at J. Fred’s.
Dates with boyfriends take place entirely within cars — at the drive-in restaurants and movies and in secluded spots with fogged-up windows and radios softly purring.
A girl soon leaves town chubby, only to return skinny a few weeks later. As their bellies swell, a couple more girls drop out of school to elope with traumatized, baby-faced boyfriends.
One night I find myself attired in a white strapless Scarlett O’Hara gown with a hoop skirt, waltzing at the country club with a tuxedoed and cummerbunded Harold. I’m taking as much pleasure in my Merry Widow corset and satin spike heels as I used to in my shoulder pads and cleats. I, too, am now proud of the Tidewater land grants my fine colonial ancestors received from King James I. My grandmother sits at a table with my parents, smiling like the Cheshire cat in her sequined gown.
Meanwhile, my sister Jane has been born with an olive complexion. Swaddled in a flannel blanket, she resembles a papoose. My mother, descended from New England Puritans, once proclaimed the idea of extramarital sex as unappetizing as using someone else’s toothbrush, so there’s no possibility of genetic intervention by some Native American milkman. Years later, when a plausible explanation emerges, some acknowledge having noticed Jane’s exotic coloring. But at the time, as in all polite southern towns, no one says a word.
My brother John was my rebel without a cause while we were growing up. He threw snowballs with rocks in them at passing cars. He tapped into the phone line and made free calls all over the world until the president of the phone company informed my father that John would go to prison unless he stopped. He built a shortwave radio to play chess matches with people behind the Iron Curtain.
I used to hide in John’s closet to watch him hypnotize his friends, stretching them board-stiff between two chairs, their heads on one and their feet on the other. He’d tell them that when they awoke, they’d walk into the shower fully dressed and turn on the faucets. Afterward they’d stand there in the shower in their soaked clothing, totally bewildered.
When John dropped out of high school to join the navy, my father hunted him down and shipped him north to Deerfield and then to MIT, where he grew the first beard Kingsporters had ever seen on a young man from a respectable family. He edited the campus humor magazine and orchestrated such pranks as planting a large cardboard missile from a military recruitment display nose-first in the floodlit MIT dome and then painting a crack down the dome as though the missile had crash-landed there.
Since John is my hero, I take his advice when he tells me to come north to college. In any case, I’m intrigued by my mother’s homeland. I’m also intrigued by my father’s madcap adventures at Harvard Medical School. So I hop a train up there, and John drives me to interviews at several colleges.
I like the woods and the lake on the Wellesley College campus because they remind me of home — apart from all the anxious young applicants in their Bergdorf Goodman suits, who are strolling the paths with their equally anxious parents prior to their interviews. I’ve bought a suit made from a material that resembles mustard-colored burlap. The red paisley blouse matches the lining of the jacket. It had seemed chic at J. Fred’s on Broad Street. But up against all that gear from Neiman Marcus, I realize that I resemble June Cleaver en route to the dentist.
I sidle toward a turreted stone structure that looks as though it might house the Addams family. As I present myself to the receptionist, I doubt if I have a chance here. I have a bad suit and no parents.
I’m ushered into a room with stained-glass windowpanes and enough elaborately carved oak furniture and paneling to have fueled the fireplace in our cabin for an entire winter. My interviewer, an older woman in a Pendleton plaid suit, doesn’t seem to notice my burlap fashion error. But she does ask where my parents are and how I’ve gotten here from Tennessee. I mumble something about my mother’s having a baby and not being able to get away. The interviewer studies me as though I’ve escaped from Tobacco Road.
An ornate silver tea service sits on a table beside her needlepoint-upholstered chair. She asks if I’d like some tea.
I accept.
Organizing two Limoges cups and saucers, she inquires whether I’d like lemon or milk.
I’ve never drunk hot tea before, but I like milk and lemon, so I say, “Both, please.”
She raises one carefully tweezed and penciled eyebrow. A corner of her lip-brushed mouth twitches. Gritting her molars so that her jaw muscles pulse, she pours milk into my cup, followed by tea. Then she briskly places a slice of lemon on my saucer and passes it to me.
After I squeeze the lemon into my tea, the milk begins to curdle, and I realize I’ve committed a faux pas. I also realize that my quest is hopeless. Whatever made me think that a mongrel like me could sprint with these Ivy League greyhounds? Did I learn nothing from the flag-swinger debacle? I’m wearing a suit sewn from a feed sack. My parents aren’t interested enough in my future to accompany me. My brother at MIT is a juvenile delinquent. I don’t know not to put both milk and lemon in hot tea. And my SATs are well below Wellesley’s average.
A month later, I’m accepted at Wellesley. Everyone is incredulous, especially me.
My grandmother arrives at our house in her silver Cadillac demanding, “What’s wrong with Duke or Vanderbilt?”
I reply that nothing’s wrong with them, but I want to see the world.
“Boston is hardly the world,” she snaps.
After enduring many years of condescension from the Seven Sisters wives of the Kingsport plant managers, she’s pleased I’ve been deemed bright enough to function at Wellesley (an assumption that soon proves questionable). But she also seems sad. It was a giant step from Darwin, Virginia, to Kings-port, Tennessee, and once she’d taken it, she rarely looked back. The step from Kingsport to Boston is even more drastic, and she doubts John and I will look back either.
Her own son went up north to the University of Rochester, one of five promising Kingsport students given scholarships there by George Eastman (who killed himself shortly afterward, hopefully for unrelated reasons). After Harvard Medical School, a residency at the Roosevelt Hospital in New York, and a tour of duty in the field hospitals of France, my father finally came back home for good. But he brought along a Yankee wife, a Congregationalist whose idea of a good time is to read the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Virginia Clubbers asked my grandmother why my father couldn’t have married a nice Virginia girl, and she repeated this to my mother.
As I skim the results of the senior class poll to be published in the next edition of the Indian Tribune, I descend into a state of terminal chagrin: I’ve been elected Most Studious. It was bad enough not to make flag swinger. Now this!
In the first place, I’m not studious. I cruise Broad with the best of them. In the second place, I didn’t need to be studious to become salutatorian. Any idiot could have done well on the true-false quizzes that determine our grades.
In fact, but for the machinations of Mrs. Hawke, I’d have been valedictorian. At the end of the term, she gave us several spelling tests in which she mispronounced the words, leaving us to guess at what we were supposed to be spelling. The boy who became valedictorian is one of her favorites.
Although I couldn’t have hoped for Most Popular since I lack vim, I did think I had a shot at Best Smile. I practiced in the mirror all year long, and my smile was definitely among the best at D-B.
I feel unable to face graduation. But I have to because, as salutatorian, I must deliver my speech. It showcases a quote from Shelley: “Naught may endure but mutability.” I point out to my yawning classmates assembled in the gym that although we can never be sure how things will change, we can be sure that change will occur.
Afterward, a flag swinger, looking like a crow in her flapping black robe, asks me if this Shelley is Shelley Fabares who sings “Johnny Angel.” I reply yes in a sad attempt to undercut my image as Most Studious.
Once we arrive at Wellesley in John’s yellow convertible, piled high with my possessions as though we’re the Beverly Hillbillies headed for Hollywood, I understand why they’ve accepted me: they pride themselves on geographical diversity, and there are only three Tennesseans in the whole place. I’m a token Tennessean. This is fine with me. Every college needs a few students who know all the lyrics to “Louie, Louie.”
Wellesley also prides itself on uplifting the disadvantaged. I pause to wonder if they’ve somehow learned about the Melungeons and mistaken me for one.
Fortunately, one of the three Tennesseans is a junior from Nashville named Ophelia, who’s been assigned to me as Big Sister. She takes me under her ample wing and explains the mysterious codes that govern the incomprehensible behavior of our Yankee classmates. She, too, has a doctor father, a Yankee mother, a sister, and three brothers. Apart from her bright red hair and heavier build, we could be twins.
What I find most shocking at Wellesley isn’t just that the other students raise their hands in class and volunteer to talk. It’s also the fact that nobody smiles or comments on the weather when we pass on the campus sidewalks. In Kingsport, I conducted endless discussions — with clerks I’d never seen before — of their latest operations and the delinquencies of their children. Some days I’d wanted to punch a clerk in the mouth to get him just to sell me a damn Coke without intruding on my private turmoil with his sordid family sagas.
But soon my early training in the orange crate kicks in at Wellesley, and I begin to cherish my invisibility. When I wear my nightgown to class beneath my trench coat, no one notices. In Kingsport, such sartorial behavior would have been critiqued for weeks.
My only complaint is that after having accepted me for being a Tennessean, Wellesley immediately tries to transform me into a Wellesley Girl. I’m forced to take a speech test. Because of my mother’s extensive coaching on how to pronounce “cow,” I’m able to conceal my true accent and win exemption from the remedial speech class.
The posture test requires us to strip down to our underwear and be photographed from several angles, as in police mug shots. Because of the Q.T. initiation fashion show, I know how to strut my stuff in a bra and panties, so I pass with high marks.
However, I’m unable to sidestep the Fundamentals of Movement class, held weekly in the gym. For half a year we’re given instruction in how to sink into a sofa while balancing a cocktail glass and how to get into a sports car in a skirt without flashing too much thigh.
My hopes are high that I’ll one day need these skills, but each blind date is more excruciating than the last. Few experiences are more demoralizing than spending a rainy weekend at Yale with a surly preppy who hates you. I soon realize that my problem is the same as when I auditioned for flag swinger: I’m not a fun person.
My parents don’t drink alcohol. It gives my father migraines, as it did his father. Also, a coalition of preachers and bootleggers — strange bedfellows indeed — has conspired to keep Kingsport dry. Moonshine is available, but some partakers suffer blindness and lead poisoning. To buy branded liquor, you must drive to Virginia. But if you get caught by Tennessee patrolmen on your trip home, you forfeit your car. Hence, the popularity of iced tea in East Tennessee. My blind dates in New England find me a drag because my idea of a bacchanal is half a beer.
However, I’m soon fixed up with Richard from Cornell. He belongs to a fraternity in which the brothers drink so much that nobody notices or cares that I’m sipping the same cocktail all night long.
Education at Dobyns-Bennett consisted of the memorization of dates and facts. At Wellesley, I soon learn that facts aren’t facts. Math has always been my favorite subject because the answers to problems are either right or wrong, as opposed to the multiple shades of gray in the humanities. But once I learn in calculus about the existence of imaginary numbers, I decide not to major in math after all.
In Bible 101,1 discover that even the word of God has been put into His mouth by ancient Christian spin doctors. With magic markers we highlight the verses inserted into the gospels by various factions trying to bolster their own grip on power.
One day in English class I experience my first true thought. As we discuss “Flowering Judas” by Katherine Anne Porter, I notice the recurrence of the word silver. In a flash of illumination I realize that Porter has done this on purpose to suggest a parallel between one of her characters and Judas Iscariot.
My mind promptly retreats into darkness. But I know I’ve discovered a new function for it. Southerners are always trying to prove how nice they are (even when they aren’t), and Yankees are always trying to prove how smart they are (even when they aren’t). It’s the difference between leading with your limbic brain or your neocortex.
But now that my neocortex has been jump-started, there’s no stopping it. Soon I’m critiquing situations I’ve always blindly accepted, like a brat pulling the wings off butterflies. Along with this newfound ability to tear anything apart comes chronic melancholy. I feel like Eve after her expulsion from the Garden of Eden as she starts to realize that she and Adam are two separate people and that the talking snake is not really her friend.
Since these are the Martin Luther King Jr. years, I quickly grow less proud of my grandmother’s alleged ancestral land grants in the Tidewater. After the murder of some civil rights workers in Mississippi, a hallmate bursts into my room to announce, “You southerners make me sick!” Another muses over a pot roast dinner one night, “It’s so interesting to hear you say something intelligent in that accent of yours.” This, despite the fact that I’ve passed their damned speech test.
I’m bewildered. Back home I was teased because my mother was a Yankee and my pronunciation of “cow” was so bizarre. I’d always longed to be a real southerner. Now I’m being accorded that honor, but it’s been transformed into a badge of shame. We learned in school that southerners fought the Civil War to protect our homeland from invasion by immigrant Yankee riffraff. But my hallmates tell me its purpose was to end slavery. I have to admit that, if true, this seems a worthy goal.
After a couple of days in the library employing my newly activated neocortex, I discover that I’m not even a pseudo-southerner. East Tennessee is so mountainous that most of its antebellum farms were subsistence operations, so there weren’t many slaves. These struggling farmers, many descended from indentured servants, resented those large landowners and merchants who were profiting from slavery. Also, many mountain families took pride in ancestors who’d fought to free the colonies from Britain and were appalled by the notion of dissolving that hard-won union.
In 1819, a Quaker named Elihu Embree founded the nation’s first abolitionist journal, the Manumission Intelligencer, in Jonesborough, the town in which my family’s farm is located. When Tennessee seceded from the Union, East Tennessee tried to secede from Tennessee, as West Virginia had from Virginia. During the Civil War, 30,000 East Tennesseans joined the Union army, comprising one-third of all white southerners who fought against the South. Guerrillas in East Tennessee burned railroad bridges there to cut Confederate supply lines. Mountain men called “pilots” led Confederate draft dodgers and deserters and escaped Yankee prisoners to the Union lines in Kentucky.
My neocortex collapses into a whimpering stupor. Since I’m taking a creative writing class, I decide to write a short story set in East Tennessee to sort this out. As Flannery O’Connor once wrote, “The Southerner knows he can do more justice to reality by telling a story than he can by discussing problems or proposing abstractions…. It’s actually his way of reasoning and dealing with experience.”
In the resulting tale, one character says to another, “Law, honey, where’d you get that hat at?”
When my professor returns the story, she’s scribbled in the margin, “Real people don’t talk this way.” I’ve never before known that the people I grew up among weren’t real. This might explain why I’m so confused.
Embracing my newly excavated Appalachian heritage, I buy a banjo and learn to play it badly. Ophelia plays a guitar, and our favorite tune is “They Are Moving Grandpa’s Grave to Build a Sewer.” The hallmate who’s sickened by southerners offers to cover our waitress shifts in the dining hall if we promise never to play it again. To punish her insolence, we sing eight verses of “Are You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb?” All around the courtyard windows slam shut. But even Ophelia good-naturedly ridicules East Tennesseans as white trash who make a laughingstock of the entire state.
Undeterred, I continue to court my inner hillbilly, lounging around the dorm in bib overalls, an undershirt, and bare feet. When my housemother, Mrs. Bradner, complains, I accuse her of cultural imperialism. I explain to my profoundly uninterested hallmates that the Deep South is to Appalachia as mint juleps are to Pepsi. That if the plantation South is the land of moonlight and magnolias, the mountain South is the land of moonshine and magnum rifles.
I take my final exams in the infirmary, where I’m incarcerated for a month with carbon monoxide poisoning acquired on a trip home from Cornell in a car with a faulty exhaust system. I also have mononucleosis from the stress of trying to function in such a bizarre place.
But I do survive the cut my freshman year, despite feeling like the first amphibian ever to lie gasping on dry land. And I’ve learned the most important lesson of an Ivy League education: Ivy Leaguers are no different from anyone else — except for the fact that they don’t know this.
Sealing my exit from the South (just as my grandmother has feared), I marry Richard from Cornell after graduation. The reception takes place in our backyard in Kingsport beneath a huge revival tent erected for free by an evangelist who’s one of my father’s many grateful patients.
A New Jersey native, Richard is working at an ad agency in New York City. By bribing several Dickensian characters lurking in a basement office, we manage to rent an apartment with high ceilings and parquet floors in a prewar building overlooking the Hudson. The only drawback is that getting from the subway on Broadway to our building is like negotiating the no-man’s-land between the British and German trenches during World War I.
As a wedding gift my father gives me a box of bullets and the .38 special his father carried in his medical bag on house calls in case of attack by a drug addict. My father kept the pistol in his sock drawer at our house in town for the same reason. But the West Nineties clearly trump the streets of Kingsport when it comes to danger. So I take the pistol to a gun shop on Broadway to get it cleaned. When I pick it up, the dealer tells me I’m lucky I didn’t fire it because a metal guard is missing and I’d have blown my hand off.
As I walk back to our apartment, I imagine a scenario in which I shout at an attacker, “Stop or I’ll blow my hand off!”
I’ve spent my first two decades struggling with whether I’m a southerner. Since my mother is a New Yorker, I feel genetically entitled to spend my next two decades struggling with whether I’m a Yankee. So I put my banjo in mothballs, buy some suits at Saks, and start work as an editorial assistant at Atheneum Publishers. Richard and I attend operas, concerts, and ballets. We eat at ethnic restaurants all over the city and attend plays both on and off Broadway. On weekends we join the nearly inert lines of traffic in and out of the city in order to ski in Vermont and swim off Long Island. We eat lobsters on Cape Cod and cotton candy on the boardwalks of New Jersey. I conclude that I like being a denizen of my mother’s motherland.
My mother’s grandmother, Ruth Griswold Greene Pealer, was a piano teacher and choir director who rose to the rank of national genealogist for the Daughters of the American Revolution. En route, she traced eleven lines of her family back to England — and one to the Mayflower (along with six million other Americans). Late in life she modeled for a bust included in an international exhibition called The Family of Man under the label “Caucasian Female.” A cast of it sits on our piano back home.
Ruth lived in South Danville in upstate New York. Her husband, Phillip Greene, died of Bright’s disease when her son, my maternal grandfather Floyd Greene, was five. She married again, this time to a farmer and state assemblyman named Peter Pealer. Peter had lost several fingers in a fireworks accident (in a novel variation on my childhood horror of extra fingers).
Caught up in the fight for women’s suffrage, Ruth delivered a speech entitled “Woman and Her Advancement” to community groups. In it she maintained that since God made the creatures of our world in order of increasing significance, Woman as the last created was intended as “the crowning work of the Creator.” This was confirmed, she insisted, by the fact that Woman was the “last at the cross and the first at the sepulcher” and that it was to Woman that Christ first appeared after His resurrection. However, because of Eve’s having been unjustly blamed for the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, “eternity has no time and words no power to express the despairing anguish and woeful heart experiences which have been the lot of Woman through all the ages.”
Upon discovering that she was a third cousin once removed to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ruth longed to go where the big-league suffragists roamed. In a letter to her teenage son Floyd she explained, “If I don’t get out of this town, I’ll go crazy.” So she left Floyd to finish high school while living with an uncle, and she dragged Peter Pealer to Washington, D.C.
Hating housework, Ruth insisted they live in a hotel. While Peter worked at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, Ruth joined the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and Wimodaughsis (short for Women/mothers/daughters/sisters), a suffrage association. She also served as president of the Women’s National Press Association.
Ruth attended rallies addressed by Susan B. Anthony and commented in letters to my grandfather on the beautiful hats and dresses of the audience. She marched up and down Pennsylvania Avenue in a hat piled high with fake fruit and flowers, demanding the vote. About her fellow suffragists she wrote to her son, “People outside have no idea of the ‘push,’ interest, and determination of the women to win their cause. There is no such word as ‘fail’ with them, and that is a force that men will find it impossible to break.”
Sadly, Ruth sliced her finger on the edge of a page in the Saturday Evening Post and died of septicemia before seeing women enfranchised. The deciding ballot in favor of national suffrage for women was cast, coincidentally, by a young legislator from East Tennessee. The night before the vote in Nashville, this young man received a letter from his mother in the mountains saying that she counted on him to do right by her and his sisters. The next day he switched his vote from con to pro. Afterward he had to jump out a window to escape an enraged mob of opponents.
In emulation of this refreshing new role model, I volunteer as a birth control and abortion counselor at Planned Parenthood, having been permanently traumatized in high school by seeing the lives of some of my classmates destroyed by a lack of such services.
Wearing a gold enamel bracelet of Greatgrandma Pealer’s that my mother has given me, I march on Washington at the drop of a hat. Each time I round the corner and start down Pennsylvania Avenue through the gauntlet of jeering men who hate everything I represent, I draw courage from the image of Inez Milholland in her white robes, riding a white horse, leading Greatgrandma Pealer and her cohorts through similar mobs in 1913.1 try to do my tiny bit to keep their ball rolling, but I avoid the Saturday Evening Post.