THIS WAS, is, truly home to me, not just a birthplace. I was born here and educated here, left when I was twenty-three, but have always returned, even though my visits have been less frequent in recent years. Mama and Papa are dead, but my brothers and sisters remain, and a few friends. And Lexington? The mud of the present years flows peacefully over the mud of the past. That which remains the same is the most altered. The bird returns and finds the old nest, rotting, but still shaped by the dusty brown twigs. In the distance there are strange, new trees, never seen before, full of pink and blue and aqua feathers and rainproof straw and chirpy little birdlings whose will and wishes are a mystery. The bright unknown somehow casts a pall over the squat memorials, those things even more than fifty years ago thought to be comfortably antique, warm with time. I am astonished, gazing out over the rooftops of bank buildings, at the peculiarity of my feelings, the oddity of my passions, the meagerness of the landscape that I singled out for myself, like a surveyor pacing off” a plot of stony soil, the rocks appearing like diamonds, constituting a chosen claim. I loved only Main Street, the ten-cent store, the old cigar store, where newspapers and magazines were sold, the Ben Ali, the Strand, and the State movie theaters, the lobbies of the Lafayette and Phoenix Hotel, Liggett’s, the sandwiches on soft, white Kleenexy bread at Morford’s Drug, the July dress sales at Embry’s and Wolf-Wile’s.
A crescendo of anxiety accompanies the past, and the new is only boredom on the surface, incomprehensible to me in its true nature, its unvarying plants and shoots flowering to their fate, its structures square and double-storied or stretched out in the way acceptable to our time, acceptable everywhere, in every city, each state, according to investment. Who can read that history—the history of now? Only some awkward boy or girl sweating in the playroom, swept on by the electrified jarrings and groanings of the house, will return to tell us what it has been—whether about Lexington or not is hard to say, for the glory of the place is a certain vault-like unreality, deadening to the lilt of the questioner’s voice, since you have only to ask to be told what the Bluegrass is all about, what Lexington means.
In any part of the South, the mind struggles, wondering whether to lie under the blanket of the past or to endure the chill of the present. It is a difficult place, the enemy of the concrete and the particular. “How can you be from here, and think like you do?” What can I answer except to say that I have been, according to my limits, always skeptical, and that I have, always, since my first breath, “been from Kentucky.” So much that is mean and unworthy in our country is appearance: people are always acting a part, banal, tacky, unfelt, inauthentic. Social wickedness and follies are “received” just as the emotion we feel sometimes about the flag in a breeze; they seem to unite the one with the many. They imagine themselves Southern, imagine themselves white people: imagine that this is definition, that the equation will have a certain solution, that the answer is their own. They are like the Aztecs with their bird god; prophecies that brought unceasing pain were nevertheless a daily consolation. There is a dreamlike, piercing pleasure in whiteness whenever it stands, even on a precipice, within sight of blackness. Poor people have lived on that alone, amidst every diminishment and insult, returning to it, as to the awakening sun in the morning.
Old families; no, our ancestors are horses. I would have gone to the ends of the earth to escape from ashtrays with horses on them, from the holy frescoes of turf scenes, winding around barrooms. And yet I store up in memory one or two rural treasures. The old Elmendorf horse farm lives on in me, like some beautiful, leafy, vine-laden Piranesi landscape. I seem to remember the damp, dark olive green of its lawns, the shaded black trees, the paths rolling, here and there brushed with sunshine, and yet closed, forest-dense, and only the pillars of the old mansion standing. Calumet Farm, with its Derby winners, its white fences and milky barns, trimmed with red, bathed in cheer and hope, always seemed to me a bit Californian. These are our cathedrals and abbeys.
Heroes. Man o’ War (“a strapping fellow, in color a dark chestnut”) was on view in the old days. There was a grandeur of muscle and a splendor of coat; memories of many a costly stand as stud seemed to linger in his coffee-brown eyes. Still an interview with this old Adam was of a singularly unresonant kind; you came away only with what you had brought with you. The thud of hooves, the highly bred, valuable thoroughbreds, were felt to bring honor to citizen and wanderer. Wizened, stunted jockey and luckless, strapped bettor took his place, each in his niche, engaged in a special pageantry.
1788: The Kentucky Gazette:
The famous horse Pilgarlic, of a beautiful color, full fourteen hands three inches high, rising ten years old, will stand the ensuing season at the head of Salt River at Captain Ave Irvins, Mercer County, and will cover mares at the very low price of ten shillings a leap . . .
What does the occasion of return call for? Description, comparison? Truth to oneself or to them? There is something gainful in being from a middle-sized, admired place, a place with an overbearing mythology. When I was in graduate school at Columbia, I met a girl who had grown up on a great rich person’s estate in Long Island. Her father was a gardener and her mother a cook. It seemed to me that this was a fate sweet with possibilities, a sort of lighthouse, from which you could see a great deal that was meant to be hidden. It is easy to reach an ironical wisdom from a low spot, especially if you are disinclined to hopeless feats of emulation and not easily moved to admiration. But this girl, her whole life scarred by a brilliant and somehow unaccommodating intelligence, was inarticulate and bitter and wild with rage. In her twisted little heart the blood beat with hatred when cars drove up the driveway. She, with her eternal reading of James and Proust, hated the very smell of the evening air, filled with the unsettling drawl of debutantes; but true hatred came to rest in the sound of her father’s gardening shears at the hedge and the swish, swish of her mother in rubber-soled nurse’s shoes and a hairnet, bending forward with a bowl of vegetables resting expertly on her open palm. In truth, here was a great spirit destroyed by feudalism—a knotty little peasant reared in a Southampton cottage.
And so the horse farms were a sort of estate and, previously, people spoke of them almost in a hushed voice, but the owners, mostly well-known, immensely rich sportsmen, were absentees, like the old landowners of Russia who lived in Petersburg and often went years without visiting the estates. The horse was supreme, but the great owners hardly existed in our folklore, fortunately. Our golden stallion, standing on the courthouse as a weathervane, was our emblem, and the prince came from afar not for our graceful Lexington ways and our beautiful girls, but for our creatures, chewing limestone to perpetuate a dynasty of swift bones. It is said that certain of the rich farm owners now spend a part of the year in residence. “When the W—s put their children in school here, the teachers were afraid to correct them.” How close to the surface, like the capillaries of a vein, are the traditions of local life. A glimpse of the truly rich, and the diseased relentlessness of their consumption, diminishes the claims of the local gentry. The prestige of “old families”—based upon what forgotten legacies beyond simple endurance in a more or less solvent condition?—cannot stand up to those bodies decorated with the precious minerals of the earth, covered with the skins of the most astonishing animals, seeking comfort and pleasures from the possession of every offering of the ground and the manufacturing imagination. Indeed who is old Dr. So and So, and Miss Somebody, with her garden and her silver cups? A blooded horse could buy and sell the lot of them.
Tobacco—that is truly more local, but I know nothing about it except that I would rather see the full-grown plants in a field than the quivering, wavering beauty of a new foal. The old warehouses and the tobacco sales, with the gossip of prices, the farmhands, the grading of the leaves—there is still something of a century ago, something of the country scenes in George Eliot. The memory of function, of sowing and reaping and selling and sowing and reaping again. Allotments and methods and machinery and bargains with tenants and country agents and rage at the government. But all I know about planting, all that I remember, are the violets and lilies of the valley at Castlewood, or is it called Loudoun—a brownish-gray stone Gothic Revival house —where we wandered; and tomato plants in our own resistant garden, and gladiola bulbs, yielding after effort, finally, their pinkish-orange goblets; and the difficult dahlia, forever procrastinating, heavily blooming at last, a liverish purple, or fuchsia. How I wish I could remember the names of the strains: weren’t they Eleanor Roosevelt or Martha Washington? Papa at six in the morning, smoking a cigarette, staring at the staked tomato plant, the staked dahlia, the staked gladiola. Never anything you could put in a vase.
•
Winter visits from New York on the George Washington of the C & O, wearing a putative mink from the Ritz Thrift Shop on 57th Street. The train passed through mining towns in West Virginia, down through Ashland, Kentucky, through Olive Hill and Morehead, a stinging, green stillness along the way, the hills rising up on either side, to cradle the train as it slipped through the valley. Square, leaning cabins, clinging like mountain goats, ribbons of wood smoke stabbing the air. Trail of the Lonesome Pine, Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come . . . I often felt guilty later, a fraud, that I knew nothing about the mountains except their songs, nothing firsthand of Appalachia, the martyrdom of Floyd Collins, of exhausted mine strips, of miners and their shy and resigned families, of the company stores, the rapacious mineowners. I read all that in The Nation and The New Republic and grieved and fumed like an idealist from the Bronx, but somehow I never met anyone who was going up that way, although I knew many who had come down from there, bringing the disreputable vowels of Harlan County, of London and Hazard, into the Bluegrass.
Beyond the business streets, there was nothing that held me except the older section of town, just north of Main. The newer “East End” with its 1920 stuccos and colonials, its nice tree-lined strips, its Drives and Ways and Avenues, its complacent children, its new Episcopalians and Christian Scientists: all of this was handsome and prosperous and comfortable and yet it lacked any compromising hint of history, seemed an elaborate defense against all the sufferings except alcoholism. There were, out there, no Negroes just around the corner, no truck routes to Ohio, no bums in cheap hotels, or country people arriving on Saturday. There was not a town of a similar size in the land that did not have its own nearly identical houses and laurel bushes, which told in their own hieroglyph the same story. Real Lexington was, to me, the old central core. It was Gratz Park and the Public Library, Morrison Chapel at Transylvania College, the John Hunt Morgan House, Dr. Buckner’s house, called Rose Hill, and surviving amidst the rusty oilcans of a filling station, backed by the peeling frames of poor people, a fine old garden facing an adjoining rectangle of old pipes, broken clothesline, Coke bottles, and the debris of hope—those unchurning washing machines, discarded toilet bowls, rusting tire rims. In the North End, poor and rich, black and white, lived together blankly and, on the part of the white people, regretfully; but there it was, a certain tradition attaching to the serene old houses on Broadway, on Second and Third, on Limestone and Mill. Alas, neither group could be thought of as enlarged or ennobled by the forced coupling; blankness, yes blankness, rather than blindness, an absence, a Sahara, with its caravans of Fords and Chevrolets looking straight ahead toward the beckoning oases, those divisions and subdivisions, developments and superdevelopments.
In all our decades in Lexington, we lived in only two houses, both of them modest indeed; the first surrounded by black people and the second, somewhat “nicer,” a few blocks away. It was in this North End of town, this mixture of the unlikely, among the races and classes, flung together by time and accident rather than by design worked out by building contractors. Negroes, the ill-lighted, rather darkly protected streets around the Public Library, Transylvania, where my two older sisters graduated, the dilapidated alleys, the race fights on Fifth Street, the depressing red-light district to the east, where the offerings on the porches or in the windows usually seemed to be missing some limb or another, the “bad black men” in their saloons on, yes, Race Street, where you didn’t walk, but often drove through, quickly, in a car, vaguely troubled by the flash of knives, the siren of the police wagon in the night. The most interesting thing was to be witness day in and day out to the mystery of the behavior in your own neighborhood, to the side-by-side psychodramas of the decent and wage-earning, and the anarchic and bill-owing, to the drunken husband and the prayer-meeting couple. Of course that is just “life” and the monk in his cell, the tycoon at the golf links cannot escape these contraries. Still, the individual existence must take place somewhere and you live under the illusion of the particular, caught up in the spell of the setting.
The old Lexington race track burned down. The horses screamed all night. This meant that during the season, fall and spring, we would, from the sidewalk, no longer see the cars streaming by, the pedestrians hurrying, nor have bedded down all around us, on cots in the neighbors’ living rooms, the old-monkey-faced jockeys. I remember little of this, but an image remains, as of an ancient troll; it was an old jockey, drunk, wanting us to play “Funiculì Funiculà” on the piano, while he sobbed, for joy and sadness. . . . Harken, harken, music sounds afar. . . . In the 1930s, under Roosevelt, one of the first housing projects went up on the site of the destroyed racing course. This place absolutely fascinated me, with its rules and its applications, its neat little plots, and there was always a good deal of talk about who was “in the project” and who was trying to get into it. Why should these uniform structures inflame the imagination that was repelled by subdivisions? No doubt it was the sway of sheer idea, of reclamation, even of a sort of socialism, of planning, price, and accommodation brought into a reasonable harmony. The project endures, looking a little quaint and small and subdued, but still bringing to mind Roosevelt’s first term.
Autumn nights, the maul and jar of Halloween, fear as I ran alone, at eight o’clock down the little lane beside our house, with only an old streetlight, like a distant moon, to lighten these last steps. Everyone in his house, cool wind, working people thinking of going to bed soon. A few years later, across town, at Henry Clay High School, I remember best a light rain splashing the windows of cars, and the hours and hours and hours, the eternity, of students parked outside Saloshin’s Drug, drinking Cokes. They are all married and some have been dead for a long time. “Drinking himself to death” is not a mere phrase. It was the fate of quite a few that I have known, gone in their youth, and the ones thus seized quite unexpected. It seemed to fall upon them, the blackness of night. Peace be with you all—Earl and Billy and Bobby and Betty and Sammy and Lutie!
A cold snap in the winter, japonica in the spring, the trees arching overhead on Bryan Station Pike. Teeth pulled early, the nuns at the old St. Joseph Hospital. The mind is shaken by the memory of certain lives it bore witness to, day in and day out, without being particularly friendly, actually not friendly at all, merely in a proximity. About so many of these one feels as William James did of the memory of a poor epileptic in an asylum: “. . . a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic. . . . He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other. That shape am I, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me from that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him.”
A neighborhood girl, later a woman, for whom we all felt an intense pity and wonder and a mystical and mutual shunning. The fall of man, the loss of grace; in youth certain pathetic and benighted souls seem to represent the fallen state too vividly and openly to be endured. Without economic necessity, this girl became a prostitute, and spent her nights in the most sordid and degrading dumps and rooming houses, wandering around raw saloons near the old wholesale houses. She was the much-loved daughter of a railroad worker, a responsible hardworking mother, and a tall, fair, old grandmother who smoked a corncob pipe. Juanita! When she was still in high school, before her “career” began, she stood around the yard a lot, with her fat, sausage curls nestling near the collar of her freshly ironed dress. She was very tall, and while perhaps not designed for perpetual good luck, also not born for this desolating misery. I am far from sure that she took money, and I know that she drank but was not a drunkard. Still she suffered terribly from her dissipations and was most lovingly nursed through her tears and pains by her family. Late at night, you could hear the car door slam on the street behind us and down the narrow, dark, moonlit lane came Juanita, her heels clicking on the pavement. Or sometimes she arrived by the street in front of our houses, by taxicab or by car. The yellow lights shone out in the darkness, all still and sleeping. The screen door of Juanita’s house slammed gently. You could imagine the bodies of her parents turning, with relief, in their beds. Home at last was this tall, curly-haired, curious voluptuary, asleep once more was the by now swollen and coarsened pleasure seeker. It all had to be paid for. She cried a lot, in pain, perhaps from hangovers, and later from venereal disease. Patience and devotion and sympathy whispered to her at home. “Juanita is not feeling well today,” her rawboned old mother, large and neat in her long, full housedress, would say. “Maybe she’s catching a little cold.” And not too many years later Juanita fearfully died, of prodigious pains and sores, expiring with unbelievable suffering.
When I looked at the awful record of Victorian lechery, recorded in the appallingly cold-hearted and obsessive My Secret Life, every hideous fornication of that Victorian gentleman and his wretched street girls, nearly all of them harassed by poverty and born into misery, made me think of poor Juanita and her foul existence. But due to what?
•
November, walking around the decayed streets where I had lived for so long, everything was sad, empty in the midmorning, broken down. But how unbelievably long the frailest shack stands, unloved, but defiant, much stronger than we are. All of them still alive!
Poor neighborhoods are vulnerable to winter. Gray sky and bare lawns, stripped trees reveal every weakness, every sagging seam and rotting board. Muddy yards and dusty porches furnished with last summer’s reclining deck chairs, soggy vinyl cushions, left to the storms. Walnut Street, never much, is a wreck; Duncan Park is a bomb site. (Here my oldest sister and her husband met, with whistles around their necks, as “playground directors.”) In Duncan Park we learned to play volleyball and tennis and listened to band concerts on Thursday night, Mama and Papa and all of us, with the young ones parading in Hollywood bobs and hand-me-downs, giggling above the breathless wrong notes of the French horns and the slippery scales of the cornet. I cannot remember a single melody played in the bandstand at Duncan Park during these elated evenings. And this is odd, since my whole life in Kentucky is punctuated by the memory of light classics and popular music of all kinds. The sixth grade and Miss Fox, our music teacher: off we went to the state Music Memory Contest in Louisville, the first step I ever took out of Fayette County. The list of the tunes we were to identify, by a sort of multiple choice I think, are fixed in memory forever: “Poet and Peasant Overture,” “Anvil Chorus,” “Amaryllis” by Ghis, “Humoresque,” etc. In Duncan Park, too, we learned a great deal of dismal wisdom before we wanted to.
Everything now is Negro, black, where Maryanne lived, and Billie Joe suffered, and Hope and Eleanor, and the preacher, and those who went to the Methodist Church and the Baptist Church, and the Crittenden Home for Unwed Mothers, and the house, new, right next to ours, where an abortionist, a woman, strange, sinister as a kidnapper, lived for a short time, and where there was once Old Mrs. This and the Blank Sisters, and those who worked at the front desk of the Lexington Laundry, the saleslady at Purcell’s, the man who rode a bicycle, and Mrs. Keating, “a character,” and Mrs. Newman, widow of a professor of engineering, her daughter teaching in the Canal Zone.
•
Red brick interrupted by the blankest of windowpanes, through which could be seen patches of black flickering like dark birds on the edge of the sea. This was our junior high school and memories of it descended on my brain like chloroform. I, a visitor now, skeptically at the door, facing the worn hallway, felt like a wife at the penitentiary on a Sunday. It is not without reason that all these places are called institutions. Young Negroes, heirs to my beaten-down junior high school, seemed to be studying what we had studied, nothing much. And there, flying high above, lost in some smoky cloud, were white teachers, like our teachers—Miss Owsley, Miss Skinner, Miss Wallace, Miss Denney. Surely all that was a thousand years ago, on some green sward, in a smoky, broken hut. A horrible sameness, nothingness mixed in the air: these poor black people had moved up to the nothing we had vacated—the textbooks, the lesson plans, the teachers, struggling through humid summer school in education courses at the University of Kentucky. The merest glimpse of the white teachers and they, not the children, looked like prison inmates, stuck with a sentence. Was there one, carrying like a burdensome tumor some inspiration, some love or devotion? Humor? Life? The principal of the school, a Negro, was going out for an appointment. He told me that the remaining white people in our neighborhood, most of them, had simply within the last year fled the scene, abandoned the turf. Chalk shrieked across the blackboard, restless bodies moved in the seats, the office typist struck the keys. Across the way, the old tumbledown grocery store, foul with pickles and a half a century of artificial flavors, waited impatiently for the afternoon pennies. Trucks braked down Fourth Street. The locked cars of the staff snoozed in the driveway.
Did we learn anything at Lexington Junior High? I have only one blazing North Star that steers me back to the seventh grade. Our class went by bus to Peewee Valley, Kentucky, to visit the house “immortalized” by Annie Fellows Johnston, the author of The Little Colonel books. Art and life came together then, in the dappled sunshine, and the house was made of white dreams. A long, maple-lined driveway, gracefully, slowly curved up to the great plantation mansion, laid out as peacefully and romantically as words on a page. Precious little mistress, sweet and gentle Little Colonel: was she there, we wondered, almost sick with pleasure, was she there in the farthest strawberry patch? This does not seem very advanced for the seventh grade and its loss is scarcely a deprivation. The bells rang out, the black students, and a few white ones, filled the halls, and the teachers, convicted, exhaled, breathing hard into the gloomy air. Torpor, nothingness, like an orphanage.
Transylvania College. Constantine Rafinesque, “one of the strangest and most brilliant figures of the middle frontier.” Botany, shells, flora, stalking the wilderness, bearded, wearing a cape, looking like a Jew peddler, and perhaps he was, although he claimed Turkey and France and Germany. Too many roots arouse suspicion. My sister Annette was crowned Miss Transylvania on the steps of Morrison Chapel on a June morning. “Dusty” Booth was Mr. Pioneer. Annette was wearing an off-white evening dress, the skirt in layers of ruffles, short in front, and going down in the back. Thus she symbolized the conquest of the wilderness, the hacking of the Indians, the capture of the fields, and the massacre at the spring, at Bryan Station.
High, nasal, “Thank you, ma’ams” in the shops, play-acting domineering fantasies of women clerking in Better Dresses. I keep thinking of the deerlike shyness of country people, making the rounds on a Saturday morning, with their eggs and chickens and sometimes a quilt. I suppose they stand in the place of something else, as the figure in a dream is really filling in for someone more important. These faces, hardly real, and the dingy nylon curtains, the groaning air-conditioners, the empty Coke machines of a downtown hotel seem to unite, to represent the past. At the hotel desk, listening to the courtesies of the elderly clerks, your dreams are made of the pink lampshades in the Bluegrass Room, memories from a hundred towns. The electric organ in the Shenandoah Bar, plastic rhododendron in the Claridge Lounge, green and blue waves on the wallpaper of the South Pacific Club, floors like those of a sour shower stall in the Tahiti Grill: the downtowns from Atlanta to Bangor are the nostalgic remains of America.
Is not Kentucky truly “the dark and bloody ground”? Was there a mysterious race of Mound Builders here before the Indians? White (yes indeed) and of high culture (yes), greatly superior to the Indian tribes who came down from the North, like some Danish barbaric tribesmen sighting Rome? If that is not enough, think of Big Bone Lick in Boone County as the graveyard of extinct animals, prehistoric elephant and mammoth. Tusks eight feet long, thigh bones four or five feet long, and enormous teeth weighing eight or nine pounds! I got all of this from a small blue school book of the 1930s (introduction by Irvin S. Cobb) . . . Nothing is to be gained by reality, but much is lost in illusion.
The mirror gives back a blur. They’ll go to the woods no more, that we know. A bizarre new life, ears tuned above the noise. The pathos of little businesses, their night lights flickering in the dark, their stocks and displays, their expansions and contractions and family lines. Established, 1917, in blood and mud, a little shoe store, fifty years of cash and credit, deaths, disappointments, summer weddings, old report cards. The years chronicled in the A&P ads in the Lexington Herald-Leader.
Mary Todd Lincoln is nothing to be happy about. Neurotic, self-loving, in debt at the White House, a bad wife, a rotten mother. Isn’t there a story of them in a carriage on the way to meet Grant in Virginia and Mary Todd meanly rapping the whole way, berating him who was no-account? A Lexington girl. Perhaps he was not sorry to go, after all. He had backed off” from her once, but then, losing his nerve, returned.
Up the same old streets again, and suddenly, after a broken fence the devastating whiteness, undimmed by the slate-gray November lawn, of the manor house, too grand, at Third Street. Beautiful long windows, clear, calling to the light. On the east, the north, the south, and the west sides: the same old downward path.
“Who speaks of victory? Survival is all.”
1969