outside world and recapture something we’ve lost.
This desire was, in fact, what led us to make our collective decision. Nearly all exiting streets, those that led directly out of the neighborhood, would be blocked off. Too many automobiles, uninvited and suspicious, ventured past our homes at night while we peered out from behind our drapes and blinds. Too many commuters cut through during rush hours to avoid the expressway. Too many west-siders, unwanted, unwelcome. We needed to close ranks, establish our independence and community solidarity.
Our best option, at least at first, was to make entrance and escape a more difficult proposition. Initially this was done by simple barricade. Drivers, though, apparently found these obstacles too constraining. Not a week would go by without someone running down the wood and metal stops. I understood the temptation, found myself on several occasions, with each wrong turn, suddenly facing the steady blip of orange, taunting me, teasing out the impulse to accelerate swiftly and grind down the obstructions.
The ever-increasing rebellion was cured for everyone eventually, once construction crews were brought in to erect concrete dividers, the perpendicular median strips that blurred any notion of continuity. This path ended; another began just beyond. Roads were renamed to further obscure past associations. Fifth Avenue became Sycamore. Third became Greenwich. Lafayette became Oak. Calhoun became St. Francis.
One homeowner, a self-employed landscape artist, oversaw the layering of grasses, flowers, trees, to give the barriers an untouchable quality, like fine china. These end-stops became, in most cases, aesthetically far superior to the yards they bordered. The landscaper left fliers wedged beneath door-knockers, between iron gate railings, under doors and into vase-lined hallways. Discounts for all community members. In response, homeowners on some dead-ends, annoyed by the seemingly ceaseless leafleting, tore out the daylilies and St. Johns wort and creeping thyme and replaced them with mammoth aloe plants and flowering cacti. Tempers flared.
Traffic out of and into the remaining opening has grown as a consequence of our roadblocks, and the single lane has slowed travel time down to a trickle. Left turns are restricted to low-volume hours. Trucks fifteen tons or over, or above ten feet in height, are prohibited. We welcome the rule of law. We’ve discussed widening the entrance to four lanes, plus a fifth for left turns. We considered petitioning the city for a traffic signal.
“This is all just so dumb,” Hero observed immediately upon her arrival. “You can’t just lock everyone out.”
But as I explained to her, that was the idea.
Someday soon, our community will be guarded by a gate, a swinging mechanical arm, a sequence of four numbers, and a speaker phone by which guests can contact their respective hosts. But there’s more. The plan, from what I’m told, is for this neighborhood to withdraw even farther, to finally sever our bonds with the outside world, to become, in some sense, completely self-reliant. We will have our own grocery stores, our own gas stations, our own movie theater. I imagine we’ll need our own office buildings, our own airport. Auto factories to make our cars and parts. Our own ranches and fields of crops. Slaughterhouses and textile factories and newspapers and universities. A new South, wholly self-sufficient.
Homes in Magnolia Grove are upper end, in price if nothing else, when there are actually ones for sale. But this happens rarely. I have only ever seen two houses here on the market. Despite this, the homeowner’s association still produces promotional materials, perhaps if only to keep public interest and property values high. The latest bulletin describes, among other things, the neighborhood’s goal as:
Building a New South for the 21st Century
The pamphlet’s cover is glossy, with a color photograph. A family barbecues in their rolling, green backyard, smiling, young children bouncing on a trampoline. Spanish moss drapes elegantly across the boughs and awnings. The father wears a white chef’s cap and sauce-stained apron. I knew him. Not well, but enough to nod as our shopping carts passed each other down grocery aisles, by the condiments, the charcoal, the bleached white breads. Bill Dreiser. A civil service engineer from three streets over who, rumor had it, made enough in a sudden stock windfall to buy this same pictured family a second home somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, near Portland or Seattle or somewhere in Northern California. Rumor had it he also bought a sailboat.
And then, while clear-cutting his new property one afternoon last summer, a tree fell on him—crushed him in the flash of an instant. When his family couldn’t find him for dinner, they searched the grounds, only to discover a trace of his shirt under the fallen log. And when, after several hours of cutting, they were finally able to remove the colossal trunk, using two pickups and over a dozen men, there was nothing recognizable beneath, nothing distinctly human for his grieving widow and children to claim—only bone and hair and pulp.
In his still-smiling photograph, I notice Bill’s graying mustache is trimmed crooked, angled upward on one side. I seem to remember this about him in person, too. One of the young girls on the trampoline, wearing a cartoon print T-shirt of a blue genie, appears caught in mid-fall, slightly blurred, frozen in time and space, as she gleefully shoots us the finger.
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Hero arrived in the middle of what she mockingly termed “The Reconstruction.” At 407 St. Francis Avenue, the two-story manor house I inherited a few years ago after my grandfather’s death, the structure of things is in perpetual flux. It’s a long-term renovation, piece-by-piece, as I have sought to restore the home’s original splendor. In its 170-year history, mirroring my own family’s evolution from Southern aristocracy to significantly poorer but quietly respected, the building has evolved dramatically as generations of my family have sought to move the structure farther and farther away from its roots—dragging it, awkward and uncomfortable, into their present. Officially, no new work had been done on the house in a hundred years—no zoning permits, no building plans of any sort; yet the house I now occupied bore little resemblance to the one laid out in the original blueprints I’d recovered from the county clerk’s office, which to the untrained eye revealed only the faintest traces of its early eighteenth-century roots.
A variety of odd additions had been made to the back and sides of the building, including a den with three walls, an attached chapel with no walls (just a stucco oval without windows) and a glass dome for a greenhouse out back. The only thing I found that seemed still directly connected to its past was the crumbling family burial plot, with its newest addition, my grandfather Devon, as Old South as they come, joining seven generations of decomposing Browns.
Most of the additions were shoddily done. My first inspection revealed mismatched lines running throughout the structure, water damage and other sure signs of leakage, irregularly shaped doorways and windows. The upstairs bathroom was missing a section connecting the sink to the drainage pipe, and half the sand dollar tiles had been stripped from the walls with what might have been the tip of a Phillips screwdriver, leaving trails in the plaster like asterisks, drifting off into incomplete thoughts.
When I learned I’d inherited this house, I couldn’t wait to move back in, despite these unsightly and potentially unsound changes, because I knew just how rare it was to find a vacancy in Magnolia Grove, and someday living in Magnolia Grove is the goal of every authentic Southern son who grows up knowing its name. But it will take years, perhaps decades, to finish restoring the place to its former glory as our family’s traditional antebellum manor house. A lifetime, even. I began almost immediately after taking possession, and six years later I still felt that I was only just getting started, the past still far out ahead of me.
In the cool of the mornings, Hero and I took our breakfast on the cracked back patio, which I hoped soon to demolish in favor of the original wraparound porch. The newly retro-designed kitchen was still on the planning board. So much was still on the planning board. I’d blown through a large chunk of my inheritance just to complete the few
