days later, August 9, a second “device” was dropped on Nagasaki, and within a week of the introduction of atomic warfare by the United States, World War II was over. When V-J Day was announced, my older sister, Elise, was home. She was to me, eleven years her junior, a wondrous being who lived away from us in Tuscaloosa, a romantic place of such Wagnerian heroes as Harry Gilmer, the All-American halfback for the Alabama “Crimson Tide.” She would be a senior at the University that fall. She and a contemporary, Anne Gambrell McCarty, decided to drive downtown to observe the spontaneous celebrations of V-J Day. In the front seat, I was happily wedged between actual college girls. Downtown we saw a good deal less than a Times Square celebration: happy people greeting each other on the sidewalk, and some honking of horns. Anne Gambrell viewed the scene unsmiling, and deflated my sense of celebration when she said the strangest thing: “The war’s over; the breadlines start tomorrow.” Her cynicism, uttered with quiet but impressive certainty, was strange to my ears, like nothing I had heard at home. Her worldview was foreign to her place and time. Anne was a liberal, a real left-winger for whom the flaws and evils of our “way of life” were more obvious and detestable than the gracious speech and manners with which they were camouflaged. She would later get in trouble in Louisville for the mortal sin of helping an African American couple buy a house in a white neighborhood—prima-facie evidence of communism in those days. Neither she nor I suspected at the time that one day I, too, would be branded a liberal and our family newspaper derisively called, principally by racists, “The RED Star.”
In 1945, downtown was just as it had always been. Hidden economic forces—wheels within wheels within wheels—had not yet engaged to signal the economic takeoff point of the Southern economy, marking its long-delayed recovery from the Civil War. Not yet risen were the winds of social change that would turn “our way of life” upside down. On Noble Street, stood the magical kingdoms, Kress’s and Woolworth’s five-and-dime stores. The warm parfait of scents from the candy counter tantalized children as they entered Kress’s to shop for Halloween masks and hats or inexpensive Christmas presents for friends and teachers. Of course, there were also the twin, hospital-white drinking fountains, one marked “White” and the other “Colored.” The wife of an Air Force officer, Rosalie Reynolds, was home on leave in the early 1950s from Germany where her seven-year-old son, “Studie,” had been born. She took the boy shopping at Sears and Roebuck, the fabulous, large store at 17th and Noble. Studie confronted one of the drinking fountains for the first time, and he was charmed. “Look, Momma,” he said excitedly. “They’ve got colored water!”
It was just such innocent discoveries that made my generation aware of the parallel universe where “colored” lived behind a barrier that read, “Do Not Enter.” I was about twelve when I first noticed the barrier as an inconvenience. I was buying a ticket at the Calhoun Theater simultaneously with a boy who’d played touch football in our unselfconscious, interracial games. He was on the other side of the glass ticket box. Inside, I waited for him to come in, but there was no door. It was then I understood why there was a red velvet rope blocking the stairs to the balcony.
Thoughts of social justice did not disturb the pleasant sameness of growing up at 818 Glenwood Terrace in the 1940s. We had rituals as perfect and predictable as Saturday afternoons at the movies. Dinner, cooked by Mildred and served by Eli, was at 6:30 sharp, when conversation was suspended to hear the radio commentary of Quincy Howe from Boston. Then Mother and Dad would discuss the events of the day. Countless times Dad punctuated the discussion with favorite quotes. “Noblesse Oblige, to whom much is given, much is expected.” “Duty is the sublimest word in the English language, quoth Robert E. Lee.” “He who fails to take heed of events far away will soon find trouble near at hand.” Whether or not those aphorisms were meant to instruct his children, they stuck with me and helped shape my view of the world.
Sunday dinner, served after church, was always fried chicken—a Mildred specialty: juicy meat covered with a golden brown crust. Often during the war, soldiers would be at the table, knights in khaki. In those days, before air-conditioning, the house was always dark in summer and the basement fan perpetually stirred the moist air. On rare occasions, Stephen Foster melodies would float from outside through the closed blinds into the dining room. The family would leave the table and assemble on the front porch to enjoy the serenade by a trio of black musicians who did not ask for but received a gratuity from our parents. The sound carried on the humid Alabama air was sweet; the memory is sad. They were the last troubadours of a dying civilization—a society with a rotten legal core but which had its charms.
Dad’s words may have been more memorable, but Mother was at the center of family life, planning meals, birthday parties, grown-up parties, and family vacations. Perversely, every August just as the hurricane season started our family headed for the Ponte Vedra Beach Resort and Club in Florida (welcomed “home” by the familiar staff). Mother was the producer and stage-manager of a series of birthday parties at which I, as guest of honor, got the prime slice of chocolate cake, “the chicken coup,” so-called because it was a corner piece with icing on two sides as well as the top. The calorie and cholesterol content could have measured in megatons. One birthday, she organized a midget baseball game at which she pitched and our then-butler-chauffeur-gardener, George Hillman, was the catcher. Bushes obscured the whole scene from neighbors across the street—except for the pitcher and catcher—and next day our across-the-street neighbor, Mrs. Miller, called to ask Mother if she enjoyed her game of catch with Hillman.
Christmas was Mother’s pièce de résistance, the beating heart of family ceremony. Christmas was also a celebration of community life. Before the boom times down South, before suburban sprawl brought us developments with names nearly as pompous as “Grande Dame Estates,” before malls and multiplex theaters, Noble was the main street. Crowded with Christmas shoppers, the vital pulse of commerce beat from Gus “Nick” Nichopolous’s community-central Sanitary Cafe to the Commercial National Bank presided over by big, friendly Marcus Howze and quiet, sweet-natured Guice Potter Sr. We even had our own Lilliputian Macy’s Day Parade. Children wedged and squeezed through the forest of adult legs to get close to the grand progression of high school bands, including the high-stepping Cobb High (black) entourage, capped by the appearance of a magnificent Santa—sowing the fields of spectators with wrapped candies, children grabbing at them in the air and scurrying to rescue fallen pieces.
At home, Mother’s much-anticipated production began with the ritual gathering of the smilax, which meant a perilous ascent of an extension ladder to clip the vines from trellises on the side of the house. Smilax was a main feature of Mother’s decorations. Lush garlands snaked up the banisters of the hall stairway and were draped over all the pictures, including the flat likeness of Grandfather, his white VanDyke beard above white tie and tails that set off three colorful medals awarded by Chinese presidents for his public health contributions to that poor nation—objects of awe, envy, and mystery to me. His picture was faced by a lovely portrait of Mother, painted by cousin Ted Mohn, hanging above the fireplace mantel on the opposite wall of the living room. The two paintings were silent witness to the ritual Christmas Eve. The perfect, undeviating sameness of those evenings, with their constant moral core, took on an almost sacramental quality. The evening began with a scratchy 78-rpm recording of Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” starring British actor Basil Rathbone as Scrooge. Its undisguised message—the evils of greed and the joys of charity—were taken seriously by our family and we never failed to be moved when Tiny Tim piped, “God bless us, every one!”
Next in the order of service came family carols, an uncertain chorus of Dad, Elise, and me, accompanied on the piano by Mother, who, as the family musician, played with firm confidence. The only flaw in the ceremonial reenactment was the perfectly awful Christmas Eve dinner of backbone—a fat, greasy, barely edible black mass whose roots in tradition are lost, a tradition to be honored in the breach. Because there was no strong pull of anticipation associated with that meal, the family listened with patient appreciation as Dad found the Second Chapter of Luke, beginning with: “And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus . . .
“And she
