Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Voodoo
DURING THE DAY, WHILE my mother worked, I moved with ease across the small property where we lived. A brindle cow bellowed from a neighbor's yard. Mr. Alexander, next door, stopped by with a honeycomb from his hive, which he shared with me; the crunching in my ears as I chewed the comb were only bee carcasses, he told me, some of the best eating. An old lady down the street yelled at me not to throw persimmons onto her sidewalk. In a corner of the yard stood what we called the arbor, really a large wooden frame draped with fragrant grapevines, muscadines, which attracted an enormity of tuneful bumblebees into the foliage; beneath the shade of these vines I stood with my eyes closed and breathed deep and drank in the purple fragrance of the swollen grapes and of the sweet leaves that, after summer rain, smelled like green peas. The bees were as loud as a stringed orchestra, and when I grew up and read a poem by Yeats about a "bee-loud glade," I was certain I had heard what the poet heard, and heard it again simply by remembering. On the other side of the house stood great, dark pecan trees, their shade so deep and constant that, no matter the weather, the side yard never fully warmed up during the day, and though I played there from morning to suppertime beneath those trees, as the sun passed across the blue sky above me, the light that reached me there was forever dim as twilight. Now half a century later the images beneath those magical trees glimmer and ripple and change as if viewed through water, as it seems to me they did even then. All such images, though they occur tome only in beauty, are really images of loneliness. My father was dead, my mother was away somewhere, somewhere behind me toiled a nursemaid hired to look after me, and I sat all alone in the crook of a willow tree that grew in a ditch alongside a dirt road, looking outward, outward from my perch for the end of longing, for rescue from grief, for which I had no word or even memory.
When I was just eighteen months old, my father died suddenly and left my young mother and me alone, just at the beginning of World War II. He had never been sick before, the story goes—"Never sick a day in his life." So when he came home early from work that day, my mother didn't even take the illness seriously and left to go to a meeting of some kind. The two of them had thought he had indigestion. He died while she was out. When my mother got word at her meeting that her husband, who she had only just seen and spoken to, was dead, she says she didn't cry at all, not until much later, so unreal was the news. She says she only came home and sat and stared out a window at a stand of pine trees out from the house. That was the only response she says she could muster.
I wish I could remember the day of my father's death. If not my father, at least the day that he died. Whether it was cloudy or sunny, who was looking after me, whether I missed him when he was not in the room that night, or the next. I have looked at photographs of myself and of my mother and father during that time, a blond boy-child with a serious, furrowed brow. In some pictures, I am wearing a gown sometimes, a dark sailor suit in other pictures. My mother is a pretty 1940s woman with short hair and spit curls, wearing a sassy dark dress with big white polka dots. Her smile is as bright as sunshine. There is one picture of my father, in which he holds me. He is wearing a hat. He has taken off his suit jacket and wears a white shirt and tie and vest. The sleeves of the shirt are bright against the dark vest. He is wearing glasses, which along with the hat brim, prevent me from seeing his eyes.
I try to see something of myself in his face, but there is nothing. The shape is different, the set of the eyes, the chin, the cheekbones. Our body shapes are different as well. As a grown man I am slender and of average height, he was short and barrel-chested. I look like my mother, I have her blue eyes, her chronic cough, her sense of humor, her straight back and high arches, and though these things I am pleased to share with her, they too are a loss to me, as they provide no purchase on that invisibility in my past. My son looks like my father, I am told, and this gives me some comfort. I look and look at him, and on the rare occasions when current feeling does not merely magnify the beauty of his presence, I do, once in a while, break through into the old abyss and catch a glimpse of what may have been the man I never knew. This is rare and not very trustworthy evidence.
The old car that my father drove on his rural mail route sits in the background of one or two photos, a dark coupe with running boards, looking like an escapee from a period movie. The family dog, a serene and silky old girl, appears in the far-back of another photograph. None of it do I remember. None of it, therefore, convinces me of its reality. Maybe it's obvious that I should not remember, from such an early age, but it seems even so that I should. Some small thing, at least. To want a thing so much—just one memory—ought to confer some entitlement. It has been hard for me to tolerate the mechanical recording of my father's existence without the full proof of my own memory.
I remember that war well enough, the one that was just beginning when he died, and so if I can remember that, then the birth of memory would seem not be far behind. Clearly I remember the news reports on the old Philco radio, the room it sat in, the blackouts and scrap metal drives (I threw a tea kettle onto a pile in front of the train depot) and ration books, the absence of young men from our town, the absence of my own uncle, a physician away from home and at risk, serving as he did in Patton's army in North Africa. So close! I want to exclaim. I am so close to remembering.
I remember angry talk of "Krauts" and "Japs." Men came home from the war with souvenirs, swastikas, German helmets, bayonets, shell casings. I remember the end of the war. My mother and I happened to be visiting an aunt in Louisville on VE day. The soldiers on the train flirted with my grieving mother, and I was surprised to observe the pleasure of her smile as she rejected them. I remember the day the Baptist preacher's daughter appeared all in tears at our back door to report the death of Roosevelt.
But my father is an invisibility. The space that he occupied has always been a significant blank spot in my imagination. I know a few things about him, not many, but I hold to them, with varying degrees of positive effect. He was nearly twenty years older than my mother, which means he was born in 1892, another century. Victoria would reign as queen of England for almost another decade. He first drew breath only twenty-seven years after the surrender at Appomatox Courthouse. He was born, in other words, about the same distance in time from that war as we are now from Vietnam. I frame the chronology in these terms in order to emphasize to myself the distance between my world and his. No wonder I can't remember him. He might as well have lived on another planet. Mark Twain was writing books when my father was born. My father served on a navy ship in the war—but not the war I remember. He was in the First World War. It's unfathomable to me.
AT MY FATHER'S DEATH my mother and I were forced to move out of the little house my parents had built and out of the gentle hills of Forest, Mississippi. We moved a hundred-some miles north to the Mississippi Delta, a vast alluvial plain in a crook of the Yazoo River. In these lonely backwaters and days of grief my memory begins.
One of my nurses during this time was a woman named Lily. Of all the child-care help my mother employed in those early years, Lily is the only one whose name has stayed with me. She was old and large-bottomed and walked with a limp, which I learned much later was the result of a beating she took as a child. Lily practiced voodoo and kept many powders and potions and herbs that were used almost always for purposes of healing and good health, but sometimes in anger, it was rumored. It was said of Lily that she removed a frog from a man's stomach.
One day Lily played a sort of joke on me. She turned on the water at the kitchen sink just enough that only air and very little water could get through the old plumbing. The pipes set up a howl, the sad, strange old groaning that I had heard and been frightened by before. Lily had her back to me. She was a large woman, always wearing an apron. Her hair was long gray and greased and wild. She told me was working a spell, a hex. She turned around suddenly, and out of her big broad nose was protruding a thick foliage of green leaves and twigs. It scared the living daylights out of me. It was a joke, but not one that I could appreciate. I thought a tree was growing out of her nose.
Whyever Lily may have thought to scare me like that, I know that I loved her. She is the first person on earth that I am sure I felt love for. I can't for the life of me remember my father, but I can identify the moment that I knew what love was, and the person I loved was Lily. When Lily moved away, I did not imagine that I would live through the loss. The loss of Lily was the loss of love. I still long for her this half century later. I still feel the soft warmth of her body as she held me. I still smell the corn bread-clean fragrance of her skin, the fruity sweetness of the pomade in her hair. I can hear the low melody of her voice calling me Sugar. I have lost other loves since this time, including two sons, so I don't mean to say that my heart still grieves for Lily. Other grief has eclipsed this, and time does heal, after all. I'm saying that when I want to get back as close to my father as memory and metaphor can take me, I call up that vivid memory of loss when Lily moved away, and I know that this is what I felt on that day before memory when my mother sat at the window and stared at a stand of loblolly pines and I was sitting or standing somewhere in a world in which, forever after, I would be a fatherless child.
