Prologue

A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.

VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Speak Memory

Today, July 29th, is my mother’s birthday. Once again, as often before, I wish I could speak with her. There’s so much that I want to ask her; so much I’d like to tell her. First, I would tell her how much I loved her—I never told her in words.

My mother’s name was Flora Whitney Miller. Her second husband, my father, George Macculloch Miller, was called Cully. My older half-brother was Whitney Tower. My half-sister is Pamela Tower, and my younger brother is Leverett Saltonstall Miller. I myself am Flora Macculloch Miller. Many servants, both black and white, who tended to us over the years, were also part of our family. We lived in Aiken, South Carolina, in Joye Cottage. It was my first nest, and the one that means the most to me in my long life; a touchstone, origin and symbol of that part of me that is deep inside.

In the summer, we went to the Adirondacks. We bathed in the cool lake, warming ourselves by a fire after catching fish for dinner or picking raspberries for a pie, lighting a kerosene lamp as darkness drew family and friends together. Our sadness each September as we left that paradise was linked to losing our freedom. We knew, even if we couldn’t conceptualize it, that we would be returning to a more restricted life. For me, life elsewhere was never as pure as life in the Adirondacks; good and evil never as unambiguous. Surely, childhood should be a time for growth, for inventive play, for vivid sensations, for security, and for the certainties of good and bad. Just as surely, it fails to give us everything that we need—whether from the human failings of parents and caregivers or the disasters of war, poverty, famine, and disease. How can I not feel grateful for the values of my own childhood? Separated from the hurly-burly of a great city, we lived in a gilded cage with all material comforts, surrounded by protective adults, unaware of hunger and the many forms of suffering that exist almost everywhere in our world. What was the effect of growing up in such a rarefied world? When did the Good and Evil I learned from the adults around me, and from the Episcopal Church and its prayer book, become real to me?

Thanks to my upbringing, I developed a rosy view of life. It included a belief that I was lucky to have been born at that particular time, in that place, to that family. For many years, I loved and idealized my childhood in Aiken, but when I married and had children, doubts began to surface. Had some of the prejudices I’d hardly noticed as a child, prejudices that I thought I’d rejected, stuck to me after all?

As I envision my mother, other characters crowd into my thoughts. I wonder if, in grasping their elusive identities, perhaps I will better understand my own. As a child, I didn’t know how valuable these people were to me. They were simply part of my life and, like most children, I took them for granted. At times, as I write, these people open their worlds to me; at others, they remain obscure, reluctantly yielding their secrets. Although some have died, they all remain with me.