There was Ladonia Griffin, Daddy Runt’s mother, whom Granny loathed, calling her ‘Old Lady Doughknee Griffin’. And Aint Hattie, Daddy Runt’s sister, whom Granny also disliked. Granny had been born a Kitchen – pronounced Keet’chun – ‘I weren’t born no Griffin,’ she’d remind Vickie. The Kitchens were mean as snakes, but it was another branch of the family that, according to Granny, ‘had let the meanness in the door.’ Everyone on Granny’s side of the family was ‘peculiar’. As Granny said about one of her sons, ‘one more inch and he’d be over.’
All these people (‘I hate that you can’t meet them!’ cried Vickie several times), lived on the same street: Harberson Walker Road, known in the family for unexplained reasons as Habersham Walker Road (Granny and Daddy Runt could ‘kinda sorta read,’ said Vickie). Across the way was the Mixon’s cotton field, which ‘Old Man Mag’ plowed with a mule. Granny feuded with Eva Mixon as well. ‘She didn’t hate the Mixons,’ said Vickie. ‘It’s more that she saw through the outer crust of them – what they were trying to be versus who she KNEW them to be.’ Granny’s insights didn’t stop her from retaliating, however, when Eva took drastic measures to protect her chicken coop. ‘They killed each other’s dogs and chickens under cover of night and poison,’ Vickie explained.
Granny ate hog brains with a cut-up onion for breakfast, and put soda in her tea to make it black. She ‘had a hard opinion on religion’. She liked country churches, which taught you to be more scared of God than the Devil, but ‘she had no inhibitions with God. She could talk to him anywhere, it didn’t have to be in church.’ Granny believed that the first thing that happened when you died was that you went blind. The incentive in becoming a ghost was to come back and ‘take a peek at something familiar’, but since ghosts couldn’t see they bumped into things and scared you. Turpentine and kerosene made into a poultice kept them away.
Jesse H (the H stood for Hamm) had come from a family of tenant farmers – Granny had a hard opinion on them, too, ‘cause they wuz high-falutin’ – but her own family worked in the Kaolin mines (Kaolin is a wet, white, sticky clay used to make chalk). Daddy Runt, who had made moonshine whisky during the Depression but never drank a drop, had a talent for charming honeybees. He began each morning by pulling up peanuts (they grow underground on the roots of peanut plants), then put in a full day at the chalk mine, went fishing in the chalk pond, cleaned and ate the fish, and spent summer evenings shelling peas.
‘Now, none of us was gonna starve in 1960,’ said Vickie, ‘but we still had to put up food for winter as if our lives depended on it.’ Granny, Daddy Runt and Jesse H – who was the oldest of ten children and near to his in-laws in age – carried the stresses of the Depression, ‘When eatin’ was a privilege’, into Vickie’s childhood. Every night in summer the whole family sat on the front porch and shucked peas, butter beans and corn. Besides being useful, shucking accomplished two goals: it insured Granny’s admonition that, ‘There ain’t no good young ‘un unless it’s a tired young ‘un,’ and it provided an opportunity for storytelling.
‘It was ungodly hot, shelling all those peas,’ recalled Vickie. ‘Southern heat: it’s a cross between you and the weather. It has an attitude about it. Ignorance, immaturity and devastation are all mixed in there, because you had to function in it. It was never just a hot night, but what you brought to that hot night. Like resentment. What made it bearable were the stories and songs. Otherwise it was just like a black drape over you.’
Often as she spoke, tilting her head back, closing her eyes, and reaching out with both hands, as if she were conducting an invisible family choir, Vickie would say ‘Now hold it a minute, let me get this just right.’ I imagined her childhood as a great jigsaw puzzle in her head, stored in pieces, and that she would rather be tortured than not give me a perfect verbal model of each one, so I could grasp the big picture (a critical challenge, as that big picture is fast fading from the Southern landscape).
Vickie spoke sadly of the people she’d known as a child not realizing that they sat on top of the largest chalk deposit in the world. Now she had a precious resource of her own – memories of her childhood amongst these people – but the difference was that she fully grasped its value. I had an uncanny feeling that she had intuited the worth of her growing-up even as a little girl, and had been hyper-aware of every incident, every relative, every syllable uttered, and collected these as treasures she would draw upon in adulthood. (Vickie explained, slowly and carefully, that her family’s high spirits had sometimes crossed the line into violence; her powers of perception were honed young, reading signs in people’s behavior so as to be on the lookout for trouble, the better to avoid it.)
Now it had become her God-given responsibility to bring this vanished world and its prickly inhabitants into the present, without letting them fall into caricature. ‘I’ll die before I let Granny Griffin get plucked out of context by someone,’ she warned, ‘and turned into Granny Clampit [from The Beverly Hillbillies].’
By this time my hand – from taking notes – and my head were both aching, but Vickie’s obsession was infectious. I felt as if I were attending the birth of a storyteller as she painfully translated the particular, the personal, the people whose breath she had felt, into characters whose lives were no longer composed of strings of disconnected incidents, but were in the process of taking on larger meanings. ‘Until 1997, when I started performing, I saw ’em as real people, y’know, who they really were. Now they’re dramatized. If it’s not actually her [Granny] on stage, the audience at least has to recognize the idea of her.’
That idea conveys Vickie’s feelings about age, among other things. ‘Granny was old. And being old was a privilege.’ Not just for the elderly, who had survived, but for the youngsters who lived with them. Age connected worlds, tethered vanished relatives and their strange ways to everyday life. Old people took up the domestic overflow, could be counted on to be at home even when parents weren’t. They were a safe harbor in a tough world: something she considered most kids to be without these days, which is one reason she decided to give the children of central Georgia a communal grandmother.
Vickie had originally tried to write about Granny and her clan for a local newspaper, but repeatedly felt tugged back to the verbal. She found she’d had to make tapes and then painstakingly transcribe them to get at the spelling of Granny’s dialect. ‘Sand bed’ wasn’t what Granny had said, when she was yelling at the kids to sweep up the chalky dust in her front yard; it was say’nd beyd. Without hearing Granny, even when her voice is filtered through the eyes, her stories leak into the modern ‘anywhere’ world of Standard English. Dialect, according to Vickie, is a place marker, and maybe a marker in time as well; without it, the gulf between Granny’s world and ours narrows, and the truth, she said, is that they are not at all contiguous.
Once she decided that sound was more important than words, Vickie started telling stories at the local library in the character of Daddy Runt. ‘It was at Christmas. I decided to show the children the way Daddy Runt did his Christmas tree. He’d a cut a pine saplin’, then pull every needle off that poor thing. Then he’d dig a hole in the corner of the yard, set it in there, and wrap light bulbs – though he’d call ’em leyt boolbs – around every limb. Granny and I would sit on the porch and watch him. She had an eye for humor, struck through with a big vein of cynicism. Since she couldn’t control Daddy Runt, she’d give him a hard time. “Jus look at that poor-ass pine tree,” she’d say, “that thang’s as bald as Old Man Brown.”’
After a few incarnations as Daddy Runt, Vickie decided the costume was too hot, and switched to Granny. Instead of simultaneously portraying and narrating every move her grandfather made – self-narration had been a longstanding habit of his – she became Granny, and in character would describe what Daddy Runt had done to that poor tree, and then take on the shortcomings of almost everyone in Wilkinson County, and in neighboring Twiggs, Bib and Baldwin Counties as well. ‘My daddy’s family was strong-willed and
