ALREADY by her twentieth birthday, my grandmother was an excellent midwife, in great demand. Her black bag bulged with mysteries in vials. This occupation led her to my grandfather, whose job was operating a rope-and-barge ferry that traveled across the Pasquotank River. A heavy cable ran from shore to shore, and he pulled the cable and thus the barge carrying people, animals, everything in the world, across the river. My grandmother was a frequent passenger, going back and forth over the river to catch babies, nurse the sick, and care for the dead as well. I hear him singing as he pulls her barge. At first it may have annoyed her, but soon it was a sound she couldn’t live without. She may have made up reasons to cross the river so she could hear him and see him. Think of a man content enough with quiet nights to work a river alone. Think of a man content to bathe in a river and drink from it, too. As for what he saw when he looked at my grandmother, if she looked anything like my mother’s high school graduation photograph, she was dazzling, her green eyes glancing from his to the water to the shore. Between my grandmother, her green eyes and mound of black hair, and the big-cookie moon low over the Pasquotank, it must have been all my grandfather could do to deposit her on the other side of the river. Imagine what he felt when she told him her name was Clarissa Kate but she insisted on being called Charlie Kate. She probably told him that Clarissa was a spineless name.
Now, some facts of her life I have not had to half invent by dream. She and my grandfather were married by a circuit rider in 1902 and lived in a tiny cabin on the Pasquotank, completely cut off from everybody but each other. My grandmother continued to nurse people who lived across the river, and soon Indian women in the vicinity came to prefer her root cures to their own. My mother was born here in 1904. She was delivered by an old Indian woman named Sophia Snow, thus her name, Sophia Snow Birch. My grandmother became hung in one of those long, deadly labors common to women of the last century. After thirty-six hours of work with little result, my grandmother decided she would labor standing, holding on to the bedpost for support, letting gravity do what it would. Sophia, however, persuaded her to be quilled, and so a measure of red pepper was blown up my grandmother’s nose through the end of a feather freshly plucked from one of her many peacocks. My grandmother fell into a sneezing frenzy, and when she recovered enough to slap Sophia, she did. Sophia slapped her back, earning both my grandmother’s respect and an extra dollar. Within the hour, my mother was born.
She told me she had a wild-animal sort of babyhood. She remembered the infant bliss of sunning on a pallet while her mother tended her herbs. Her parents kept sheep on free range in the yard, and my mother told me how she had stood by a caldron and soaked the wool down into indigo with a boat paddle twice as tall as she was. She said to me, “We were like Pilgrim settlers. Everything had to be done, and we did everything.”
They left Pasquotank County in 1910. The suicide of Camelia, my grandmother’s twin sister, made it impossible for her to stay there. They were so bound together that as small children, when they slept in the same crib, they awakened every morning each sucking the other’s thumb. Grief for Camelia hounded my grandmother from the place where her family had lived for five generations. Within days after Camelia’s hydrocephalic son died, his wildly sorrowful father wandered out and lay like one already dead across the railroad tracks, to be run over by the afternoon train. Camelia lost her mind immediately. My grandmother implored her sister to come stay with her, but she would not. She stayed alone in her house and handled baby clothes and wrung her hands in the clothes of her husband and baby until these clothes and she herself were shredded and unrecognizable. My grandmother would go each day and change Camelia’s soiled dresses and linens while she walked all through the house naked, moaning, “Oh, my big-headed baby! Oh, the man I adored!”
Just when my grandmother was wondering how much worse things would become, Camelia developed a fixation on Teddy Roosevelt, writing love letters to the White House which were opened at the local post office and made available to anyone who wanted a good snicker. The Roosevelt fixation continued a long time, too long, as told by the fact that when Camelia’s body was found, with great razor gashes at her neck, wrists, and elbows, there was a note from her idea of Mr. Roosevelt on her kitchen table. It said:
Dere Camelia,
go an git yor belovet husbendzs razer and take it to bed wit yu.
it wuz a mistak the babi bean born. go be wit him and yor belovet in paridiz.
Luv Sinserle,
Theodor
Among her other personal effects, my grandmother found more than a hundred notes Camelia had written to herself from Mr. Roosevelt.
My grandfather did not want to leave Pasquotank County, but the government’s decision to scrap the ferry for a modern steel bridge satisfied my grandmother’s urgent need to leave. She was so relieved that her sighs all but created wind. The only decision they needed to make was where to go. They chose Wake County because my grandfather was convinced that this was a place overflowing with gorgeous opportunities even for an illiterate barge operator. He had never been to Wake County himself, but he had ferried a great many of what he took to be highly respectable gentlemen from there. I bet they were not. I bet he simply had no basis for comparison, and that these men were just farmers in clean clothes. Southern gentlemen would not have had a call to visit the far side of the Pasquotank. There was nobody there, in short, to give them any money.
On the way to Wake County, something happened. They stopped and cut a man down from a lynching. This poor man was alive but barely, and after my grandmother rubbed voice back into his throat with her bare hands, he sat up and regarded the botched execution with great contempt. He rode with my grandparents the rest of the way to Wake County, sitting beside my mother in the buggy, telling her hoarsely again and again, “They will come and look at that tree and have to wonder. I bet they’ll bet Jesus took me down. They won’t come looking for me now, not with the power of God in me.” He thanked my grandparents with a railroad watch, a tin of excellent snuff, and an easy-life charm he pulled off a greasy thin chain around his ankle. (The charm, he said, was the hind foot of a white graveyard rabbit caught at midnight, under the full moon, by a cross-eyed Negro woman who had been married seven times.) He then walked around this part of the state for the rest of his life with a thick scar around his throat, singing my grandmother’s praises. He talked his salvation into legend.
My mother’s family didn’t arrive poor. My grandmother’s savings as well as the stock she inherited from a wealthy landowner whom she had once treated for syphilis made her a woman of surprisingly comfortable means. But because she lacked the social position commensurate with her robust financial portfolio, she couldn’t live in the surroundings she deserved. Instead, she purchased the best house in the Beale Street area, the worst part of town. My mother always approved of this, saying, “If we had moved where my mother could’ve very easily afforded, nobody would’ve played with me, Daddy would’ve had nobody to drink with, and she would’ve had to suffer notes on the door telling her she couldn’t plant that much bloodroot and sassafras in the front yard.”
My grandmother soon created suspicion within the neighborhood anyway. She woke up one morning to find a petition nailed to her front door. It read: “The redio cawsd it so git rit ov it.” Ten neighbors actually signed the petition, or rather, six signed and four X’d. The week before, she had acquired a radio, which ran off a low wire strung across the backyard, and that weekend a tornado touched down and leveled a row of shotgun houses, killing dairy cows, chickens, and (sad to say) a small boy. It reduced many people with next to nothing to nothing. And then somebody must have asked the question: What spoilt the sky? I imagine somebody recalling the strange wire stretched across the new family’s yard, and thus the petition. My grandmother solved this matter by inviting people into the house one evening to listen to an experimental broadcast of news, religious music, and inspirational poetry on her radio, and while they were there she removed warts, cut out bunions, mixed laxatives, and applied a salt-and-soda swab to a hideous case of pyorrhea. My grandfather delighted the men in the crowd with samples of Pasquotank moonshine and empty promises that there was plenty more where that came from. By ten o’clock my grandmother was having to push a host of new, loyal patients out the door, along with their inebriated husbands and my mother’s sleepy new playmates.
My grandfather scrounged around for work. Finally he took a job he loathed, saying it was thoroughly beneath his dignity. The longer he worked this contemptible job, the more dignity he imagined he had lost. He was, for want of a better term, a gofer for a blacksmith. He wasn’t allowed to shoe the horses, just tote the ashes. As he became more and more frustrated with his life, he became, understandably, more and more unbearable. My grandmother secretly withdrew her affection and offered more of herself to caring for my mother and her patients and achieving local fame for hygienic improvements in not only her home but others’. Although improvements such as sidewalks and modern plumbing were common in other parts of town, the mill district had been neglected because, as my grandmother put it, “the people there didn’t count as people.” She shamed the owner of the textile mill into installing wide boardwalks beside two particularly soupy streets by asking him point-blank how he slept at night knowing children were wading to school through mud and the gore from the meat-packing house up the hill. As for bringing the area onto the city sewage lines, she succeeded by reminding the city council of a fact it was (shocking to say) not aware of: that the residents of this tiny district were all white, not a colored person among them. Years later she told me, “It shouldn’t have made any difference to them. That it mattered one iota was criminal.” After the sewer lines were installed, the director of the public works department wrote her a note of commendation in which he actually said that if he had realized the Beale Street area was all white, he would’ve installed the lines long before.
Whenever someone had a toilet put in, a message would be sent for my grandmother to go and give a lesson. For many people, a toilet remained a long time as something they stared at. My grandmother was to be remembered for many achievements, from campaigning for in-school vaccinations to raising money to buy prosthetics for veterans of the World War, but in the Beale Street area of Raleigh she lives in the memory of an old few as the first woman anybody knew with the courage not only to possess a toilet but to use it.
She developed a fantastic trade, with sick people coming forth like the loaves and the fishes, putting one real doctor in such danger of losing patients that he sent her a nice note and a ten-dollar bill. This only encouraged her. She put the word out that she knew how to fix teeth, even though she did not. What she knew was that everybody in 1910 needed this done, and once they were at the house, she inquired after their other ailments and cured what she knew how to cure, and astounded people into forgetting about their teeth. When she finally branched out into dentistry, she did so because, as she said, it was easy money. Her instruments were needle-nose pliers and a wrench, both ordered from Sears, Roebuck, her anesthesia was chloroform ordered from a veterinary supply firm, and her technique came straight from Dr. John C. Gunn’s Domestic Medicine: The Poor Man’s Friend in the House of Affliction, Pain and Sickness. What is most fascinating with regard to her dentistry is that she would put women patients under, but work on the men as is. She believed that although women, as a rule, could stand more pain and take more punishment than men, they should not have to and would not ever suffer under her care. She told me that her women patients loved chloroform, the feeling of falling backward and forgetting for a while about diapers and laundry and supper. The degree to which a woman looked tired in the face dictated the amount of chloroform she received, and sometimes when my grandmother recognized that a woman was too taxed by her life, she did her the favor of knocking her out to the point that she could neither lift her head nor say her name the rest of the day. She said, “Some of these women, if they didn’t have me work on their mouths, they’d never have gotten off their feet.”
My mother, during this time, was happy as pie, going to elementary school, coming home and wrapping bandages, pressing pills, helping with supper, doing her homework by the fire. She first witnessed an operation performed by her mother in 1911, when she was seven. So much blood was involved that they could never fully scrub it out of the cracks in the kitchen linoleum. A man from the sawmill in back of their house suffered a horrible accident, and as the company doctor was not to be found, the man was rushed to my grandmother’s kitchen table. She sewed him up with the only thread she had, red cotton, and nursed him back to health. He slept in my mother’s bed and ate liver three times a day for a week. My mother slept on a warm pallet by the woodstove, waking up those mornings with the odor of liver burning her nose. The man taught my mother how to play whist and also how to make the spirits rap under the card table. For payment, my grandmother requested that the sawmill hire the best carpenter in town to build a lovely addition onto her home. Otherwise, she said, the world would know about the loose blades, loose belts, and unoiled machinery that she’d heard about as the victim ate his dinner.
As time passed, my grandparents had less and less to say to each other. There was no fighting, since they couldn’t find anything between them they cared enough to fight about. My grandfather would come home from a day of toting ashes at the livery stable, eat, and then sit and watch his wife grind herbs or read used medical textbooks. He would fall asleep watching her, and eventually she stopped bothering to wake him to go lie down in his comfortable bed. She would let him sleep upright in a chair all night and would walk out of the room when he complained of a stiff neck in the morning. My mother told me, “He would sit there and sigh and shake his head, watching her become better and better at what she loved. He admired her, I think, but all the same, he couldn’t bear it.”
After just two years in Wake County, they were at the point of completely wordless meals, wordless evenings, wordless Sundays. My grandfather was destined to leave this sort of situation, so he left. He left the way sad men leave: he did not come home from work. Maybe he missed a river, because this is where he went—not to the Pasquotank, as there was nothing there for him, but west to the Ohio. I imagine he went there without stopping. I think of him not eating or sleeping until he got there. (That sort of hurling oneself at a desire is a family trait, and has made convicts, scholars, lovers, and dope fiends out of us from way back.) He reportedly had a grand time on the Ohio without his wife. Travelers carted home tales of my grandfather’s loving Ohio Valley women galore.
How did my grandmother react when her husband let his supper get so cold? She let his dishes sit at his place overnight, and then the next morning she threw them in the sink and broke them every one, yelling, “To hell with him!” She left his clothes in the closet, which was a sign to my mother, even so young. My grandmother had no friends or acquaintances other than her patients, so there were no rounds of explaining to be made. Nobody would be watching her to see how she managed. Nobody would note the breadth of her pride. Well, nobody except my mother, who watched and learned. This is what she learned: A man will leave you.
Did my mother miss him? She told me that at the time she did not. I asked how a child could not miss her father. She said, “I was busy. I was highly involved in the life of my second grade.” What she meant is that she had learned to read. She was the sort of curious child, I would think, who is transformed by school. These children become adults too soon, but seemingly happy ones, and content. But then, later in her life, when she needed a memory of tenderness to reconcile what she lacked with my father, she must have relived the evening her father’s dinner sat waiting, and that next morning, and the next night, and on and on and on.
My mother spent much of her childhood riding back and forth to funerals in Pasquotank County. Although the suicide of my grandmother’s sister had driven her away from home, she was called back several times to wash the bodies of other relatives who had done the same thing. In 1917 she buried two cousins who became despondent after they read their father’s name on a wartime casualty list at the train station. The ground opened up and swallowed them, standing together reading the wall. That evening at supper somebody broke a pitcher, and these girls secreted the glass into their bosoms and went down to the root cellar and used the fragments. Double blood flowed everywhere, soaking the bottoms of the wooden baskets that held all the family’s winter food. A few days after my grandmother returned home, her aunt hired a gypsy to conduct a silly and desperate midnight seance, and after he was told the story of all the blood in the basement, he said that potatoes had eyes and had not only seen but soaked up the sight of the two girls in the back corner. He volunteered to relieve the family of this evil food, promising to burn the bushels in a fire on sacred ground somewhere, together with a lock of hair of John the Baptist or some other saint. As gypsies were inclined to do, he rode away with the family’s winter food and was never seen again. When my grandmother was asked to send money so they could eat that winter, she would not. She let them grieve hungry.
Her family did not speak to her until they needed her again, a year later, for another burial. She went, taking my fourteen-year-old mother with her to sit at the wake and occupy her mind writing morbid poetry in her diary. The uncle my grandmother washed and laid out had spent the last five years of his life so bent down and twisted back on himself with arthritis that parts of his body that had ceased to get light and air had molded. He hated his life, and told everyone he knew how anxious he was to end it. After supper one evening he wandered off into the woods, where he was found the next morning, stretched out as if sleeping, with a basket half full of the kinds of things he had eaten: death-cap mushrooms, yew bark, juniper berries, a sliver of root from the mayapple, and much, much more. My grandmother’s family had, by this time, become so embarrassed over their remarkable suicide rate that they denied the old man had died of anything other than natural causes. For all time, they would say, “He didn’t kill himself. He died of arthritis. ”
This dismissal of the truth angered my grandmother so much that she vowed not to speak to her family again, no matter who was dying or dead. She would let them rot in Pasquotank County. My mother remembered her standing on her aunt’s porch and screaming, “You can all jump in the goddamn river and drown and see if I come and lay you out!” My mother remembered how she stood there in the middle of the yard, how she could see her mother’s back and her hands on her hips, and how, behind the house, the Pasquotank River roared. She told me that the first thing she figured out about life was why none of these relatives jumped in that river, convenient as it was. She said, “I knew I was smart when I checked my answer with my mother, and she said I was right. She bought me a bag of hard candy as a reward for reasoning out a bit of the universe.”
This is why, as my mother imagined, six members of my grandmother’s family used variously violent and painful means to kill themselves, without a thought of jumping in the river that ran by their doors: They threatened to kill themselves in the river all the time. They used the threat in arguments with each other. They said the words without thinking, which was something my mother had already noticed that every adult in the world, except for her mother, did. If you don’t stop it with that other woman, I’m going to jump in the river. If you don’t stop chewing with your mouth open, I’m going to jump in the river. But they didn’t go in the river, because the river was life to them, life all surging and all crashing into white foam on river rocks they had known their whole lives, and the thought of throwing themselves into a familiar current and banging choked and goggle-eyed against rocks they had stood on and courted on and fished and dreamed on, and sat in the sun and dared to open their blouses and nurse their babies on, this was not something they could do. They would walk fifty miles and jump in some other person’s river, but not their own.